les out dreadfully in her neck, began by
infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed,
unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with the cunning born of
travail.

It was actually a matter of fifteen minutes, that breathless swing
toward the floor, the mattress rising after her with scarcely a whisper
and her two bare feet landing patly into the pale-blue room slippers,
there beside the bed.

Then her bag, the beaded one on the end of the divan. The slow, taut
feeling for it and the floor that creaked twice, starting the sweat out
over her.

It was finally after more tortuous saving of floor creaks and the
interminable opening and closing of a door that Carrie Samstag, the
beaded bag in her hand, found herself face to face with herself in the
mirror of the bathroom medicine chest.

She was shuddering with one of the hot chills. The needle and little
glass piston out of the hand bag and with a dry little insuck of breath,
pinching up little areas of flesh from her arm, bent on a good firm
perch, as it were.

There were undeniable pockmarks on Mrs. Samstag's right forearm.
Invariably it sickened her to see them. Little graves. Oh! oh! little
graves! For Alma. Herself. And now Louis. Just once. Just one more
little grave--

And Alma, answering her somewhere down in her heartbeats: "No, mamma.
No, mamma! No! No! No!"

But all the little pores gaping. Mouths! The pinching up of the skin.
Here, this little clean and white area.

"No, mamma! No, mamma! No! No! No!"

"Just once, darling?" Oh--oh--little graves for Alma and Louis. No! No!
No!

Somehow, some way, with all the little mouths still parched and gaping
and the clean and quite white area unblemished, Mrs. Samstag found her
back to bed. She was in a drench of sweat when she got there and the
conflagration of neuralgia, curiously enough, was now roaring in her
ears so that it seemed to her she could hear her pain.

Her daughter lay asleep, with her face to the wall, her flowing hair
spread in a fan against the pillow and her body curled up cozily. The
remaining hours of the night, in a kind of waking faint she could never
find the words to describe, Mrs. Samstag, with that dreadful dew of her
sweat constantly out over her, lay with her twisted lips to the faint
perfume of that fan of Alma's flowing hair, her toes curling in and out.
Out and in. Toward morning she slept. Actually, sweetly, and deeply, as
if she could never have