BY
NEW YORK
1892
Copyright, 1891, by Harper & Brothers
MR. AND MRS. EDWARD ROBERTS; THE CHOREWOMAN
Mrs. Roberts, with many proofs of an afternoon’s
shopping in her hands and arms, appears at the door
of the ladies’ room, opening from the public
hall, and studies the interior with a searching gaze,
which develops a few suburban shoppers scattered over
the settees, with their bags and packages, and two
or three old ladies in the rocking-chairs. The
Chorewoman is going about with a Saturday afternoon
pail and mop, and profiting by the disoccupation of
the place in the hour between the departures of two
great expresses, to wipe up the floor. She passes
near the door where Mrs. Roberts is standing, and
Mrs. Roberts appeals to her in the anxiety which her
failure to detect the object of her search has awakened:
“Oh, I was just looking for my husband.
He was to meet me here at ten minutes past three;
but there don’t seem to be any gentlemen.”
The Chorewoman: “Mem?”
Mrs. Roberts: “I was just looking for my
husband. He was to meet me here at ten minutes
past three; but there don’t seem to be any gentlemen.
You haven’t happened to notice—”
The Chorewoman: “There’s a gentleman
over there beyant, readin’, that’s just
come in. He seemed to be lukun’ for somebody.”
She applies the mop to the floor close to Mrs. Roberts’s
skirts.
Mrs. Roberts, bending to the right and to the left,
and then, by standing on tiptoe, catching sight of
a hat round a pillar: “Then it’s
Mr. Roberts, of course. I’ll just go right
over to him. Thank you ever so much. Don’t
disturb yourself!” She picks her way round the
area of damp left by the mop, and approaches the hat
from behind. “It is you, Edward!
What a horrid idea I had! I was just going to
touch your hat from behind, for fun; but I kept myself
from it in time.”
Roberts, looking up with a dazed air from the magazine
in his hand: “Why, what would have happened?”
Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, you know it mightn’t
have been you.”
Roberts: “But it was I.”
Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, I know; and I was perfectly
sure of it; you’re always so prompt, and I always
wonder at it, such an absent-minded creature as you
are. But you came near spoiling everything by
getting here behind this pillar, and burying yourself
in your book that way. If it hadn’t been
for my principle of always asking questions, I never
should have found you in the world. But just as
I was really beginning to despair, the Chorewoman
came by, and I asked her if she had seen any gentleman
