Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/28

2 light, a tall girl, her shoulders heavy and her hips wide. The teakettle whined on the stove and the night clamour of crows rose in the woods. The marsh itself was silent but for a twitter of little nests on the edge of the sulphur sky.

Hannah shivered and thought how the frost would blacken the tomato-vines in the night. Her coarse, stained hands lay loose in her lap.

She was not twenty; her mother had been dead for ten years, and her father's house kept by a maiden aunt until she was thirteen. She had seen the courtship of a widower fat and nervous, and was not surprised when her father, biting his lips and flicking his eyes as if he expected a tantrum, informed her that her aunt was going to be married and she would have to stay at home from school.

The widower grew bald, and while he went courting wet his infrequent hairs and combed them forward in stripes on his shiny head. He disciplined his moustache with wax.

His lady laid the iron like a pair of scissors across the lamp chimney, and curled her colourless hair. She pinned a white ruffle inside her dress to dissemble the flatness of her breasts and fastened a fall of lace at her throat and descended the stairs with simpering dignity.

Hannah remembered how she had crept out on the steps after her father was in bed to peer through the rails at the lovers. The widower smiled anxiously and patted her hand as he talked of himself and his grown son. His beloved always nodded too emphatically and mixed the words of her answers. All one evening he held his plump arm around her meagre waist and turned down the lamp to kiss her while Hannah trembled above in the dark.

The fluttering old maid came up to the room they shared. Between eyelids which seemed to be closed Hannah watched her in a flannel night-gown buttoned tight under her chin throw herself on her knees in an ecstacy of prayer, crying softly, and pressing her flat breasts against the bed.

Hannah had seen at first no reason to dread her new responsibilities and although she discovered reasons enough, she knew no one to whom she might have complained. This evening she thought of her delinquent father, vain, abusive, and drunken.