What would they say about her and him?
Wasn’t the general state of his family low enough, as it was?
And so, now he stood, staring and puzzled the while Esta cried.
And she realizing that he was puzzled and ashamed, because of her, cried the more.
“Gee, that is tough,” said Clyde, troubled, and yet fairly sympathetic after a time.
“You wouldn’t have run away with him unless you cared for him though — would you?” (He was thinking of himself and Hortense Briggs.) “I’m sorry for you, Ess.
Sure, I am, but it won’t do you any good to cry about it now, will it?
There’s lots of other fellows in the world beside him.
You’ll come out of it all right.”
“Oh, I know,” sobbed Esta, “but I’ve been so foolish.
And I’ve had such a hard time.
And now I’ve brought all this trouble on Mamma and all of you.”
She choked and hushed a moment.
“He went off and left me in a hotel in Pittsburgh without any money,” she added.
“And if it hadn’t been for Mamma, I don’t know what I would have done.
She sent me a hundred dollars when I wrote her.
I worked for a while in a restaurant — as long as I could.
I didn’t want to write home and say that he had left me.
I was ashamed to.
But I didn’t know what else to do there toward the last, when I began feeling so bad.”
She began to cry again; and Clyde, realizing all that his mother had done and sought to do to assist her, felt almost as sorry now for his mother as he did for Esta — more so, for Esta had her mother to look after her and his mother had almost no one to help her.
“I can’t work yet, because I won’t be able to for a while,” she went on.
“And Mamma doesn’t want me to come home now because she doesn’t want Julia or Frank or you to know.
And that’s right, too, I know. Of course it is. And she hasn’t got anything and I haven’t.
And I get so lonely here, sometimes.”
Her eyes filled and she began to choke again.
“And I’ve been so foolish.”
And Clyde felt for the moment as though he could cry too.
For life was so strange, so hard at times.
See how it had treated him all these years.
He had had nothing until recently and always wanted to run away.
But Esta had done so, and see what had befallen her.
And somehow he recalled her between the tall walls of the big buildings here in the business district, sitting at his father’s little street organ and singing and looking so innocent and good.
Gee, life was tough.
What a rough world it was anyhow.
How queer things went!
He looked at her and the room, and finally, telling her that she wouldn’t be left alone, and that he would come again, only she mustn’t tell his mother he had been there, and that if she needed anything she could call on him although he wasn’t making so very much, either — and then went out.
And then, walking toward the hotel to go to work, he kept dwelling on the thought of how miserable it all was — how sorry he was that he had followed his mother, for then he might not have known.
But even so, it would have come out.
His mother could not have concealed it from him indefinitely.
She would have asked for more money eventually maybe.
But what a dog that man was to go off and leave his sister in a big strange city without a dime.
He puzzled, thinking now of the girl who had been deserted in the Green–Davidson some months before with a room and board bill unpaid.
And how comic it had seemed to him and the other boys at the time — highly colored with a sensual interest in it.
But this, well, this was his own sister.
A man had thought so little of his sister as that.
And yet, try as he would, he could no longer think that it was as terrible as when he heard her crying in the room.
Here was this brisk, bright city about him running with people and effort, and this gay hotel in which he worked.
That was not so bad.
Besides there was his own love affair, Hortense, and pleasures.