Any occupation, even the most menial, was either beyond her skill or beyond her strength, or beyond both.
Suddenly she recalled that she could sing.Her prostrate spirit suddenly leaped erect.Yes, she could sing!
Her voice had been praised by experts.Her singing had been in demand at charity entertainments where amateurs had to compete with professionals.Then down she dropped again.She sang well enough to know how badly she sang--the long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and operatic or concert or even music-hall stage.Her voice was fine at times.Again--most of the time--it was unreliable.
No, she could not hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer.Miss Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it was reliable.
``There is nothing I can do--nothing!''
All at once, with no apparent bridge across the vast chasm, her heart went out, not in pity but in human understanding and sisterly sympathy, to the women of the pariah class at whom, during her stops in New York, she had sometimes gazed in wonder and horror.``Why, we and they are only a step apart,'' she said to herself in amazement.``We and they are much nearer than my maid or the cook and they!''
And then her heart skipped a beat and her skin grew cold and a fog swirled over her brain.If she should be cast out--if she could find no work and no one to support her--would she-- ``O my God!'' she moaned.
``I must be crazy, to think such thoughts.I never could! I'd die first--DIE!'' But if anyone had pictured to her the kind of life she was now leading--the humiliation and degradation she was meekly enduring with no thought of flight, with an ever stronger desire to stay on, regardless of pride and self-respect--if anyone had pictured this to her as what she would endure, what would she have said? She could see herself flashing scornful denial, saying that she would rather kill herself.Yet she was living--and was not even contemplating suicide as a way out!
A few days after Presbury gave her warning, her mother took advantage of his absence for his religiously observed daily constitutional to say to her:
``I hope you didn't think I was behind him in what he said to you about going away?''
Mildred had not thought so, but in her mother's guilty tone and guiltier eyes she now read that her mother wished her to go.
``It'd be awful for me to be left here alone with him,''
wailed her mother insincerely.``Of course we've got no money, and beggars can't be choosers.But it'd just about kill me to have you go.''
Mildred could not speak.
``I don't know a thing about money,'' Mrs.Presbury went on.``Your father always looked after everything.''
She had fallen into the way of speaking of her first husband as part of some vague, remote past, which, indeed, he had become for her.``This man''--meaning Presbury--``has only about five thousand a year, as you know.I suppose that's as small as he says it is.I remember our bills for one month used to be as much or more than that.'' She waved her useless, pretty hands helplessly.``I don't see HOW we are to get on, Mildred!''
Her mother wished her to go! Her mother had fallen under the influence of Presbury--her mother, woman-like, or rather, ladylike, was of kin to the helpless, flabby things that float in the sea and attach themselves to whatever they happen to lodge against.Her mother wished her to go!
``At the same time,'' Mrs.Presbury went on, ``Ican't live without somebody here to stand between me and him.I'd kill him or kill myself.''
Mildred muttered some excuse and fled from the room, to lock herself in.
But when she came forth again to descend to dinner, she had resolved nothing, because there was nothing to resolve.When she was a child she leaned from the nursery window one day and saw a stable-boy drowning a rat that was in a big, oval, wire cage with a wooden bottom.The boy pressed the cage slowly down in the vat of water.The rat, in the very top of the cage, watched the floor sink, watched the water rise.And as it watched it uttered a strange, shrill, feeble sound which she could still remember distinctly and terribly.It seemed to her now that if she were to utter any sound at all, it would be that one.
