"It won't hurt if I tiptoe in and sit with her," he pleaded.
"No, Louis. No one knows how to get her through these spells like I do.
The least excitement will only prolong her pain."
He trotted off then down the hotel corridor with a strut to his
resentment that was bantam and just a little fighty.
That night as Alma lay beside her mother, fighting sleep and watching,
Carrie rolled her eyes sidewise with the plea of a stricken dog in them.
"Alma," she whispered, "for God's sake. Just this once. To tide me over.
One shot--darling. Alma, if you love me?"
Later, there was a struggle between them that hardly bears relating. A
lamp was overturned. But toward morning, when Carrie lay exhausted, but
at rest in her daughter's arms, she kept muttering in her sleep:
"Thank you, baby. You saved me. Never leave me, Alma.
Never--never--never. You saved me Alma."
And then the miracle of those next months. The return to New York. The
happily busy weeks of furnishing and the unlimited gratifications of the
well-filled purse. The selection of the limousine with the special body
that was fearfully and wonderfully made in mulberry upholstery with
mother-of-pearl caparisons. The fourteen-room apartment on West End
Avenue, with four baths, drawing-room of pink brocaded walls and
Carrie's Roman bathroom that was precisely as large as her old hotel
sitting room, with two full length wall-mirrors, a dressing table
canopied in white lace over white satin and the marble bath itself, two
steps down and with the rubber curtains that swished after.
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