Mrs. Joseph Green. . . . I beg your pardon? . . . Oh. G-r-e-e-n. . . . Oh, Mrs. Wells! Oh, is that you? How do you do? This is Kate Green. I'm telephoning from Mrs. Driggs's. . . . Oh, I'm very well, thank you; it's Joe—could Doctor Wells come and have a look at him? Yes. . . . No, I don't think . . . oh, thank you ever so much. . . . Thank you. Good-by. What do I do now, Mrs. Driggs?"
"See, hang it up here. Now you let us know if there's anything in the world we can do."
Kate hurried back across the street. Jodie was playing alone under the lilac bush, good as gold, making snow Parker House rolls. Kate stopped to stuff a cold wet little hand into a mitten, to tuck a bent red ear under his knitted cap. Then in to Joe.
"And that," she said impressively to Carrie Pyne a week later, "is the last time I've been out of this house."
For Joe was really ill. He had double pleurisy, and Doctor Wells said there was danger of pneumonia and thought to himself of the way Joe had been drinking lately. He was suffering so that he couldn't sleep except when he was given morphine; he couldn't eat, though everyone sent delicious things—quivering jellies, chicken broth, hothouse grapes. He would try while Kate held a spoonful, tears running down sometimes over her cheerful stretch of smile. But it was too hard to swallow. A spoonful of calf's-foot jelly, a peeled grape—that was enough. Kate would stop
