But still she didn’t, she couldn’t, want to die. No matter how terrible her future looked, her strong spirit clung to life, even the most repulsive life. It wasn’t that she feared death, but she resented it. It was the complete defeat, the final outrage. As her time drew near, she began greatly to dread dying. She would lie by the hour, thinking of death, in a sort of silent fury. III At last it came upon her, one July morning, that most shocking and insensate of nature’s cruelties. Her mother sat by her in fatalistic patience, knowing well that there was no escape, no alleviation. There was a doctor whom Mrs. Kennedy had summoned--not the noble and kindly physician of Angelica’s romance, but an indifferent and callous one accustomed to the poor and their profitless agonies. He was very cheerful. He was able to look down upon that young face distorted in brutal anguish, and smile. "Nothing to be done now," he said. "I’ll look in again in an hour or so." He returned too late. The protesting little spirit had entered the world without him, and lay crying, wrapped in an old flannel night-dress, in Mrs. Kennedy’s lap, while the young mother watched it with unfathomable eyes. CHAPTER FOUR I Angelica sat at the kitchen table, her blouse torn rudely open at the neck, wet through with perspiration, haggard and worn almost beyond recognition. "My Gawd!" she said, pushing back her hair. "It’s hot as hell, mommer!" Mrs. Kennedy sighed, without speaking or interrupting her work. She was standing at the ironing-board, finishing a big week’s washing. It was a night of intolerable and sultry heat, and the kitchen, with the stove lighted for the irons, and the gas blazing for light, was a place of torment. The two women were curiously pallid, curiously alert, with the terrible activity of exhaustion. They had reached so high a point of suffering, both physical and mental, on that night, that they were no longer aware of their pain. "Listen, mommer!" said Angelica. "Here’s what I’ve written." She picked up the sheet of soft paper with blue lines, on which the ink blurred and the pen dug and scratched, and on which she had written: VINCENT: The baby has been sick all the time, and now he is worse. You got to send some money for him. You got to find it somewhere if you have not got it. He is in a terrible bad state. He only weighs six pounds, and he is going on for six weeks. ANGELICA. She read it in her hoarse, thrilling voice, and it sounded so vehement, so passionate, so touching, that they both believed the letter to be so in itself. "Now I’ll run out and mail it," she said. Just as she was, with disheveled hair and unfastened blouse, she hurried out into the street. A man spoke to her, and she swore at him.