Samstag found her
way back to bed. She was in a drench of sweat when she got there and the
conflagration of neuralgia curiously enough, was now roaring in her
ears so that it seemed to her she could hear her pain.
Her daughter lay asleep, with her face to the wall, her flowing hair
spread in a fan against the pillow and her body curled up cozily. The
remaining hours of the night, in a kind of waking faint she could never
find the words to describe, Mrs. Samstag, with that dreadful dew of her
sweat constantly out over her, lay with her twisted lips to the faint
perfume of that fan of Alma's flowing hair her toes curling in and out.
Out and in. Toward morning she slept. Actually, sweetly and deeply as if
she could never have done with deep draughts of it.
She awoke to the brief patch of sunlight that smiled into their
apartment for about eight minutes of each forenoon.
Alma was at the pretty chore of lifting the trays from a hamper of
roses. She places a shower of them on her mother's coverlet with a kiss,
a deeper and dearer one somehow, this morning.
There was a card and Mrs. Samstag read it and laughed:
Good morning, Carrie.
Louis.
They seemed to her, poor dear, these roses, to be pink with the glory of
the coming of the dawn.
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