Jane Moore came once or twice after she and Theodosia had sat together to talk of Conway’s death, but presently she was occupied with other friends who lived out the Olivet Pike and with these she had begun to go to Sulphur Springs, where there was a hotel and a pavilion for dancing. Frank would come to sit, stopping on his way from the town, or he would offer a bit of rowing on the pool beyond the fairgrounds. She went again and again to see Americy, and she would sit quietly on the chair opposite while Americy ironed for an hour, watching her motions and her changing face. Americy would talk with a slight embarrassment of one thing and another, and Theodosia would look intently at her skin, her looks, her clouded eyes, her hand on the iron, the still veins in her moving wrist where the blood must surely throb. A faint sickness would spread over her, so delicate as to be scarcely perceived, but she would cling to her act of penetration, probing to come nearer to the life under the brown flesh. She would watch Americy’s finger bones as they articulated in moving the iron and in settling the linen in a smooth path before her. She would ask all she dared of her life, her men, her lovers. “Who’s your fellow now, Americy?” “Aw, go on!” “Your man, who is he now?” “I got no man now.” “You got a beau, you know you have.” In the word, beau, she would edge away from a direct scrutiny of Americy’s affairs, diverting the question to gain more space for the discussion. “You know you’ve got a beau. Who takes you places?” Americy was embarrassed. “I goes by my own self. I don’t need no beau.” Looking at Americy’s drooping eyelids she would try to detect the nature of her wish, her pleasure, to go into her bosom and know its need, into her body, her limbs, her passive presence. Americy had had many men, that she knew. Did she have more than one at a time, she would wonder, and again she would plead with the brown veins at the wrist above the smoothing iron, with the swaying gestures of the hand above the board, to know what was the quality of the passion that bent Americy to her way of life, pity and pride and tenderness making within herself an emotion which might have been called love. Lethe was usually gone from the house, for she was working as a cook somewhere. If she were at hand she kept aloof, but even in her absence she was more easily comprehended as holding more direct passions. “You could bring your clo’s for me to do same as always,” Americy said. “You learned me to play and I’d as lief as not do up your clo’s all time.”