Page:My mortal enemy - 1926.djvu/53

 driver, and gave him such a large fee that he snatched off his hat and said twice: “Thank you, thank you, my lady!” She dismissed him with a smile and a nod. “All the same,” she whispered to me as she fitted her latchkey, “it’s very nasty, being poor!”

That week Mrs. Henshawe took me to see a dear friend of hers, Anne Aylward, the poet. She was a girl who had come to New York only a few years before, had won the admiration of men of letters, and was now dying of tuberculosis in her early twenties. Mrs. Henshawe had given me a book of her poems to read, saying: “I want you to see her so that you can remember her in after years, and I want her to see you so that we can talk you over.”

Miss Aylward lived with her mother in a small flat overlooking the East River, and we found her in a bathchair, lying in the sun and watching the river boats go by. Her study was a delightful place that morning, full of flowers and