That’s how I shall get over everything. I shall get tired.”
Ben lighted a cigarette.
“That’s better,” he said.
“Let’s get something to eat.”
He smiled thinly.
“Come along, Samson.”
They walked out slowly around the house.
He washed himself, and ate a hearty meal.
The boarders finished, and wandered off into the darkness variously — some to the band-concert on the Square, some to the moving-pictures, some for walks through the town.
When he had fed he went out on the porch.
It was dark and almost empty save where, at the side, Mrs. Selborne sat in the swing with a wealthy lumber man from Tennessee.
Her low rich laughter bubbled up softly from the vat of the dark.
“Miss Brown” rocked quietly and decorously by herself.
She was a heavily built and quietly dressed woman of thirty-nine years, touched with that slightly comic primness — that careful gentility — that marks the conduct of the prostitute incognito.
She was being very refined.
She was a perfect lady and would, if aroused, assert the fact.
“Miss Brown” lived, she said, in Indianapolis.
She was not ugly: her face was simply permeated with the implacable dullness of the Mid–Westerner.
In spite of the lewdness of her wide thin mouth, her look was smug. She had a fair mass of indifferent brown hair, rather small brown eyes, and a smooth russet skin.
“Pshaw!” said Eliza.
“I don’t believe her name’s ‘Miss Brown’ any more than mine is.”
There had been rain.
The night was cool and black; the flower-bed before the house was wet, with a smell of geraniums and drenched pansies.
He lighted a cigarette, sitting upon the rail.
“Miss Brown” rocked.
“It’s turned off cool,” she said.
“That little bit of rain has done a lot of good, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was hot,” he said.
“I hate hot weather.”
“I can’t stand it either,” she said.
“That’s why I go away every summer.
Out my way we catch it.
You folks here don’t know what hot weather is.”
“You’re from Milwaukee, aren’t you?”
“Indianapolis.”
“I knew it was somewhere out there.
Is it a big place?” he asked curiously.
“Yes.
You could put Altamont in one corner of it and never miss it.”
“How big is it?” he said eagerly.
“How many people have you there?”
“I don’t know exactly — over three hundred thousand with the suburbs.”
He reflected with greedy satisfaction.
“Is it pretty?
Are there a lot of pretty houses and fine buildings?”
“Yes — I think so,” she said reflectively.
“It’s a nice homelike place.”
“What are the people like?
What do they do?
Are they rich?”