In the Closed Room | Page 2

when the whistle blew; there was the supper, which
might not be in time to be in waiting for him when he returned in the
evening. The midday meal was a trifling matter, needing no special
preparation. One ate anything one could find left from supper or
breakfast.
Judith's relation to her father and mother was not a very intimate one.
They were too hard worked to have time for domestic intimacies, and a
feature of their acquaintance was that though neither of them was
sufficiently articulate to have found expression for the fact--the young
man and woman felt the child vaguely remote. Their affection for her
was tinged with something indefinitely like reverence. She had been a
lovely baby with a peculiar magnolia whiteness of skin and very large,
sweetly smiling eyes of dark blue, fringed with quite black lashes. She
had exquisite pointed fingers and slender feet, and though Mr. and Mrs.
Foster were--perhaps fortunately--unaware of it, she had been not at all
the baby one would have expected to come to life in a corner of the
hive of a workman's flat a few feet from the Elevated Railroad.
"Seems sometimes as if somehow she couldn't be mine," Mrs. Foster
said at times. "She ain't like me, an' she ain't like Jem Foster, Lord
knows. She ain't like none of either of our families I've ever heard
of--'ceptin' it might be her Aunt Hester--but SHE died long before I was
born. I've only heard mother tell about her. She was a awful pretty girl.

Mother said she had that kind of lily-white complexion and long
slender fingers that was so supple she could curl 'em back like they was
double-jointed. Her eyes was big and had eyelashes that stood out
round 'em, but they was brown. Mother said she wasn't like any other
kind of girl, and she thinks Judith may turn out like her. She wasn't but
fifteen when she died. She never was ill in her life--but one morning
she didn't come down to breakfast, and when they went up to call her,
there she was sittin' at her window restin' her chin on her hand, with her
face turned up smilin' as if she was talkin' to some one. The doctor said
it had happened hours before, when she had come to the window to
look at the stars. Easy way to go, wasn't it?"
Judith had heard of her Aunt Hester, but she only knew that she herself
had hands like her and that her life had ended when she was quite
young. Mrs. Foster was too much occupied by the strenuousness of life
to dwell upon the passing of souls. To her the girl Hester seemed too
remote to appear quite real. The legends of her beauty and unlikeness to
other girls seemed rather like a sort of romance.
As she was not aware that Judith hated the Elevated Railroad, so she
was not aware that she was fond of the far away Aunt Hester with the
long-pointed fingers which could curl backwards. She did not know
that when she was playing in her corner of the room, where it was her
way to sit on her little chair with her face turned towards the wall, she
often sat curving her small long fingers backward and talking to herself
about Aunt Hester. But this--as well as many other things--was true. It
was not secretiveness which caused the child to refrain from speaking
of certain things. She herself could not have explained the reasons for
her silence; also it had never occurred to her that explanation and
reasons were necessary. Her mental attitude was that of a child who,
knowing a certain language, does not speak it to those who have never
heard and are wholly ignorant of it. She knew her Aunt Hester as her
mother did not. She had seen her often in her dreams and had a secret
fancy that she could dream of her when she wished to do so. She was
very fond of dreaming of her. The places where she came upon Aunt
Hester were strange and lovely places where the air one breathed
smelled like flowers and everything was lovely in a new way, and when

one moved one felt so light that movement was delightful, and when
one wakened one had not quite got over the lightness and for a few
moments felt as if one would float out of bed.
The healthy, vigourous young couple who were the child's parents were
in a healthy, earthly way very fond of each other. They had made a
genuine love match and had found it satisfactory. The young mechanic
Jem Foster had met the young shop-girl Jane Hardy, at Coney Island
one summer night and had become at once