Then she would come in, jaded, irritable, the paint very brilliant on her pale face, and begin undressing--not in the dark, as she had done formerly, to avoid disturbing her mother. She would come into the room with no effort to be quiet, light the gas, and dawdle about, while the poor anxious woman in bed lay watching her, sometimes asking questions, but timidly, dreading a rebuff. "Bah! I’m so sick of it!" Angelica told her one night. "Those cheap dances--those smart Johnnies mauling you round with their sweaty hands--and then a glass of beer and a whole lot of their cheap talk. _Cheap_, all of it! I’m sick of--everything!" She had flung herself down fully dressed on her cot, her soiled white shoes on the clean spread. "Just _sick_!" she repeated, with a break in her voice. Her mother was moved. "Maybe it’s because you got used to better sort of people out where you were," she said. Angelica raised herself and looked at her. "_Better!_ Well, maybe they were. I don’t know. Only--I don’t know--I did get to like having things nice, and hearing nice voices. All this is kind of a sudden change. And the bunch I go out with--Lord, what a bunch!" "Then why do you go out so much, deary? Why don’t you stay home?" "Oh, for Gawd’s sake, mommer! After working all day, a girl my age can’t sit home alone all evening." Alone! The poor woman winced. "You could read magazines, or get books out of the library." "I don’t want to read. There’s nothing in books. I want to live. I want to find out if there’s anything--anywhere." "What do you mean, deary? If there’s anything anywhere?" "Oh, it don’t matter! I’m going to bed. Good night!" They went on in this way for weeks. What misery for the mother! She was nothing to her child; she could not even serve her. Angelica had become completely independent. She didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Kennedy, to go out with her, to stay at home with her. Moreover, she had grown indifferent to the little niceties about which she had once been so fastidious. Sometimes she would get in earlier than her mother. Then, without waiting, she would get some sort of meal for herself, eaten off the tub tops, from the saucepan in which it was cooked. She would spend a long time dressing herself in her vivid finery, leaving the dirty pots for her mother to wash. Then again she wouldn’t appear until late, long after Mrs. Kennedy had disposed of her meal. "We met some of the fellers," she would say; "and we hung around a while and ate a lot of candy. I don’t want any dinner." One evening her mother weakly reproached her for her lateness. "There I had a nice bit of chopped meat fried and ready for you," she said. "You ought to let me know when you’re not coming in. It’s a trouble to me and a waste of money to buy things and you not to touch them." "Forget it!" said her child. "I’m never in any hurry to get home, I can tell you. To this hole! Why should I?" "To see me!" cried her mother in desperation.