"I might wanta write to you," insisted Edna. "Anything might happen and you not know--" "Oh, well, then," Joan admitted, with an air of extreme ennui, "the number's Two-eighty-nine. Catch that? Don't forget." "I won't." "Besides," Joan added, lifting her voice for the benefit of the listener in the dining-room, "you don't need to be so much in a rush to think I ain't ever coming back to see you. You got no right to think that of me, after the way I've turned in my pay week in and week out, right straight along. I don't know what makes you think I've turned mean. I'm going to come and see you and ma every week, and as soon's I begin to make money you'll get your share, all right, all right!" "Joan--" the younger girl whispered, drawing nearer. "What?" "They had a nawful row last night--ma and pa--after you went." "I bet he done all the rowing!" "He"--Edna's thin, pale cheeks coloured faintly with indignation--"he said rotten things to her--said it was because you took after her made you want to go on the stage." "That's like him, the brute!" Joan commented between her teeth. "What'd she say?" "Nothing. Then he lit into Butch, but Butch stood up to him and told him to shut his face or he'd knock his block off." "And he did shut his face, didn't he?" Edna nodded vigorously. "Yeh--but he rowed with ma for hours after they'd went to bed. I could hear him fussing and swearing. She never answered one word." Reminiscences of like experiences of her own, long white nights through which she had lain sleepless, listening to the endless, indistinguishable monologue of recrimination and abuse in the adjoining bedroom, softened Joan's mood. She returned to the dining-room. Her mother's head had fallen forward on arms folded amidst the odious disorder of unclean dishes. Through a long minute Joan regarded with sombre eyes that unlovely and pitiful head, with its scant covering of greyish hair stretched taut from nape to temple and brow and twisted into a ragged knot at the back, with its hollowed temples and sunken cheeks, its thin and stringy neck emerging from the collar of a cheap and soiled Mother Hubbard. With new intentness, as if seeing them for the first time, she studied the dejected curve of those toil-bent shoulders, and the lean red forearms with their gnarled and scalded hands. Dull emotions troubled the girl, pity and apprehension entering into her mood to war with selfishness and obstinacy. This drudge that was her mother had once been a woman like herself, straight and strong and fashioned in clean, firm contours of wholesome flesh. To what was due this dreadful metamorphosis? To the stage? Or to Man? Or to both?... Must she in the end become as her mother was, a battered derelict of womanhood, hopeless of salvage? Slipping to her knees, she passed an arm across the thin, sharp shoulders of the woman. "Ma ..." she said gently. The response was a whisper barely audible, her name breathed in a sigh: "Joan...."