She went to her window and looked out. Years ago, like Elinor, she had
watched the penitentiary walls from that window, with their endlessly
pacing sentries, and had grieved for those men who might look up at the
sky, or down at the earth, but never out and across, to see the
spring trees, for instance, or the children playing on the grass.
She remembered the story about Jim Doyle's escape, too. He had dug
a perilous way to freedom. Vaguely she wondered if he were not again
digging a perilous way to freedom.
Men seemed always to be wanting freedom, only they had so many different
ideas of what freedom was. At the camp it had meant breaking bounds,
balking the Military Police, doing forbidden things generally. Was that,
after all, what freedom meant, to do the forbidden thing? Those people
in Russia, for instance, who stole and burned and appropriated women,
in the name of freedom. Were law and order, then, irreconcilable with
freedom?
After she had undressed she rang her bell, and Castle answered it.
“Please find out if Ellen has gone to bed,” she said. “If she has not, I
would like to talk to her.”
The maid looked slightly surprised.
“If it's your hair, Miss Lily, Mrs. Cardew has asked me to look after
you until she has engaged a maid for you.”
“Not my hair,” said Lily, cheerfully. “I rather like doing it myself. I
just want to talk to Ellen.”
It was a bewildered and rather scandalized Castle who conveyed the
message to Ellen.
CHAPTER VII
“I wish you'd stop whistling that thing,” said Miss Boyd, irritably. “It
makes me low in my mind.”
“Sorry,” said Willy Cameron. “I do it because I'm low in my mind.”
“What are you low about?” Miss Boyd had turned toward the rear of the
counter, where a mirror was pasted to a card above a box of chewing gum,
and was carefully adjusting her hair net. “Lady friend turned you down?”
Willy Cameron glanced at her.
“I'm low because I haven't got a lady friend, Miss Boyd.” He held up
a sheet of prescription paper and squinted at it. “Also because
the medical profession writes with its feet, apparently. I've done
everything to this but dip it in acid. I've had it pinned to the wall,
and tried glancing at it as I went past. Sometimes you can surprise them
that way. But it does no good. I'm going to take it home and dream on
it, like bride's cake.”
“They're awful, aren't they?”
“When I get into the Legislature,” said Willy Cameron, “I'm going to
have a bill passed compelling doctors to use typewriters. Take this now.
Read upside down, its horse liniment. Read right side up, it's poison.
And it's for internal use.”
“What d'you mean you haven't got a lady friend?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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