New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Single women -- Fiction; Social classes -- Fiction
Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie Crane’s
timely rescue from disease had been one of the most satisfying
incidents of her connection with Gerty’s charitable work. She had
furnished the girl with the means to go to a sanatorium in the
mountains: it struck her now with a peculiar irony that the money
she had used had been Gus Trenor’s.
She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not
forgotten; but her voice failed in the effort, and she felt herself
sinking under a great wave of physical weakness. Nettie Struther,
with a startled exclamation, sat down and slipped a shabbily-clad
arm behind her back.
“Why, Miss Bart, you ARE sick. Just lean on me a little till you
feel better.”
A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from
the pressure of the supporting arm.
“I’m only tired—it is nothing,” she found voice to say in a moment;
and then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion’s eyes, she
added involuntarily: “I have been unhappy—in great trouble.”
“YOU in trouble? I’ve always thought of you as being so high up,
where everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean,
and got to wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world,
I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and
that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But
you mustn’t sit here too long—it’s fearfully damp. Don’t you feel
strong enough to walk on a little ways now?” she broke off.
“Yes—yes; I must go home,” Lily murmured, rising.
Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side.
She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of
over-work and anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments
of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social
refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But
Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and
energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be
cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.
“I am very glad to have seen you,” Lily continued, summoning a
smile to her unsteady lips. “It’ll be my turn to think of you as
happy—and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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