Harriet was deeply moved. Too much that Tillie poured out to her found an
echo in her own breast. What was this thing she was striving for but a
substitute for the real things of life--love and tenderness, children, a
home of her own? Quite suddenly she loathed the gray carpet on the floor,
the pink chairs, the shaded lamps. Tillie was no longer the waitress at a
cheap boarding-house. She loomed large, potential, courageous, a woman who
held life in her hands.
"Why don't you go to Mrs. Rosenfeld? She's your aunt, isn't she?"
"She thinks any woman's a fool to take up with a man."
"You're giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you're asking my
advice."
"No'm. I'm asking what you'd do if it happened to you. Suppose you had no
people that cared anything about you, nobody to disgrace, and all your life
nobody had really cared anything about you. And then a chance like this
came along. What would you do?"
"I don't know," said poor Harriet. "It seems to me--I'm afraid I'd be
tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even if--"
Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not she,
had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter, the
insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right can be
built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At last, when
Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.
"I know how you feel, and I don't want you to take the responsibility of
advising me," she said quietly. "I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But
before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think
the way I do about it."
And so, for a time, Tillie went out of the life of the Street as she went
out of Harriet's handsome rooms, quietly, unobtrusively, with calm purpose
in her eyes.
There were other changes in the Street. The Lorenz house was being painted
for Christine's wedding. Johnny Rosenfeld, not perhaps of the Street
itself, but certainly pertaining to it, was learning to drive Palmer Howe's
new car, in mingled agony and bliss. He walked along the Street, not
"right foot, left foot," but "brake foot, clutch foot," and took to calling
off the vintage of passing cars. "So-and-So 1910," he would say, with
contempt in his voice. He spent more than he could afford on a large
streamer, meant to be fastened across the rear of the automobile, which
said, "Excuse our dust," and was inconsolable when Palmer refused to let
him use it.