His black beard shone
against her white dress. The two women sat beside him and talked.
McGregor gathered that the frail woman was a maker of hats. Something
about her attracted him and he leaned against the wall and looked at
her, not hearing the talk.
A youth came up and took the other woman away. From across the hall
the barber beckoned to him.
A thought flashed into his mind. This woman beside him was frail and
thin and bloodless like the women of Coal Creek. A feeling of intimacy
with her came over him. He felt as he had felt concerning the tall
pale girl of Coal Creek when they together gether had climbed the hill
to the eminence that looked down into the valley of farms.
CHAPTER VI
Edith Carson the milliner, whom fate had thrown into the company of
McGregor, was a frail woman of thirty-four and lived alone in two
rooms at the back of her millinery store. Her life was almost devoid
of colour. On Sunday morning she wrote a long letter to her family on
an Indiana farm and then put on a hat from among the samples in the
show case along the wall and went to church, sitting by herself in the
same seat Sunday after Sunday and afterward remembering nothing of the
sermon.
On Sunday afternoon Edith went by street-car to a park and walked
alone under the trees.
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