The Foreigner | Page 5

such purpose, indeed, that before the
two weeks had gone Mrs. Fitzpatrick felt that to the little girl's eager
and capable hands the baby might safely be entrusted.
"It's the ould-fashioned little thing she is," she confided to her husband,
Timothy. "Tin years, an' she has more sinse in the hair outside av her
head than that woman has in the brains inside av hers. It's aisy seen

she's no mother of hers--ye can niver get canary burrds from owls' eggs.
And the strength of her," she continued, to the admiring and
sympathetic Timothy, "wid her white face and her burnin' brown eyes!"
And so it came that every day, no matter to what depths the
thermometer might fall, the little white-faced, white-haired Russian girl
with the "burnin'" brown eyes brought Paulina's baby to be inspected
by Mrs. Fitzpatrick's critical eye. Before a year had passed Irma had
won an assured place in the admiration and affection of not only Mrs.
Fitzpatrick, but of her husband, Timothy, as well.
But of Paulina the same could not be said, for with the passing months
she steadily descended in the scale of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's regard. Paulina
was undoubtedly slovenly. Her attempts at housekeeping--if
housekeeping it could be called--were utterly contemptible in the eyes
of Mrs. Fitzpatrick. These defects, however, might have been pardoned,
and with patience and perseverance might have been removed, but
there were conditions in Paulina's domestic relations that Mrs.
Fitzpatrick could not forgive. The economic arrangements which turned
Paulina's room into a public dormitory were abhorrent to the Irish
woman's sense of decency. Often had she turned the full tide of her
voluble invective upon Paulina, who, though conscious that all was not
well--for no one could mistake the flash of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's eye nor
the stridency of her voice--received Mrs. Fitzpatrick's indignant
criticism with a patient smile. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in
her efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as
domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as
charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in
the colloquial English of her environment. Together they laboured with
Paulina, but with little effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite
unconscious, of moral shock. It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a little to
discover during the progress of her missionary labours that even Anka,
of whose goodness she was thoroughly assured, did not appear to share
her horror of Paulina's moral condition. It was the East meeting the
West, the Slav facing the Anglo-Saxon. Between their points of view
stretched generations of moral development. It was not a question of
absolute moral character so much as a question of moral standards. The
vastness of this distinction in standards was beginning to dawn upon
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and she was prepared to view Paulina's insensibility to

moral distinctions in a more lenient light, when a new idea suddenly
struck her:
"But y're man; how does he stand it? Tell me that."
The two Galician women gazed at each other in silence. At length Anka
replied with manifest reluctance:
"She got no man here. Her man in Russia."
"What!" exclaimed Mrs. Fitzpatrick in a terrible voice. "An' do ye
mane to say! An' that Rosenblatt--is he not her husband? Howly
Mother of God," she continued in an awed tone of voice, "an' is this the
woman I've been havin' to do wid!"
The wrath, the scorn, the repulsion in her eyes, her face, her whole
attitude, revealed to the unhappy Paulina what no words could have
conveyed. Under her sallow skin the red blood of shame slowly
mounted. At that moment she saw herself and her life as never before.
The wrathful scorn of this indignant woman pierced like a lightning
bolt to the depths of her sluggish moral sense and awakened it to new
vitality. For a few moments she stood silent and with face aflame, and
then, turning slowly, passed into her house. It was the beginning of
Paulina's redemption.

CHAPTER III
THE MARRIAGE OF ANKA

The withdrawing of Mrs. Fitzpatrick from Paulina's life meant a serious
diminution in interest for the unhappy Paulina, but with the
characteristic uncomplaining patience of her race she plodded on with
the daily routine at washing, baking, cleaning, mending, that filled up
her days. There was no break in the unvarying monotony of her
existence. She gave what care she could to the two children that had
been entrusted to her keeping, and to her baby. It was well for her that
Irma, whose devotion to the infant became an absorbing passion,
developed a rare skill in the care of the child, and it was well for them
all that the ban placed by Mrs. Fitzpatrick upon Paulina's house was
withdrawn as far