Ceremony of the Innocent Read Online Free PDF

ill and undone. If Mrs. Porter refused, she would have to submit.
    The door opened again and it was Mrs. Porter, tall and massive and flushed in her dark-blue silk dress and ruffles, who entered, followed by the newly smirking Mrs. Jardin. Mrs. Porter was not only jowly and fat; she resembled an aging milkmaid, for her skin was coarse and her mouth brutal. There were gold bangles on her thick wrists, and her fading fair hair was a pompadour of rolls and braids. Her light eyes, wide and red-rimmed with sparse lashes, were the color of skimmed milk. She looked shocked and disbelieving.
    “What is this, May?” she demanded, her usually genteel voice roughened and harsh. “Fifty cents extra for just a few hours, when you agreed to that dollar, which was more than generous.” The silk ruffles rattled about her throat and at the hem of her dress. “His honor, the Mayor, pays his head bookkeeper only six dollars a week, six days a week, and sometimes at night, and Mr. Hodgins is grateful, too! At the rate you’re asking,” and she did a rapid mental calculation, “you’d be getting nine dollars a week! You must be mad, May.”
    “‘Tisn’t like it was for a week,” May said, and visibly trembled now. “It’s just one day, and the landlord’s just raised the rent another fifty cents a month. And my niece, Ellen, has just got to have a pair of shoes. I can buy a pair at the secondhand store for seventy-five cents. She’s just got to have them, Mrs. Porter. I can’t let her get crippled.”
    “I’m not engaged in running an orphan asylum, May,” Mrs. Porter said, and moved her hand impatiently as if waving away an impertinent fly. “Your—niece is old enough, Mrs. Jardin tells me now, to be working for her own living instead of lying about your house only sleeping and eating, a big girl like that! Fourteen.” She glanced at Mrs. Jardin, who was enjoying herself. “Mrs. Jardin tells me Ellen is for hire. I’ll pay her seventy-five cents a week, if you are just sensible, May, and realize the enormity of what you have been asking.”
    Ellen, Ellen, thought May Watson. But she sensed victory again. Mrs. Porter’s voice had taken on a hint of wheedling. So May said, with a stubbornness which pleasantly surprised her, “I got to have the extra fifty cents, ma’am. I really have. Maybe this once, only.”
    Mrs. Porter smiled grimly. She threw out her hands. “Very well, May. But I’ll remember this, I surely will. I never heard of such ingratitude. I’ve been your good kind friend, May, and have called on you often to help Mrs. Jardin in an emergency. But your sort is never grateful! Never. That’s what’s wrong with this world these days. Ingratitude, imposition. You have me at a disadvantage, May. Otherwise I’d dismiss you at once. You should feel deeply ashamed.”
    She looked down at her dress. “And you charged me a dollar for mere slight alterations! A dollar! Just to let out the skirt and add the ruffles.”
    “It was all handwork,” said May. “Not machine work, like all the rest of it. Handwork. Took me three nights. Was more than just letting out the skirt and adding the ruffles. I had to take it all apart, every piece of it, and fit it together. Thought I’d never get it finished. Your waist,” said May with uncommon bluntness, “has got real thick the last two years, Mrs. Porter.”
    The large coarse face above her darkened and appeared to become bloated with anger. “We’re very saucy, aren’t we? Very loose and heedless with our speech, too. The world’s becoming a very ungodly place, May Watson.”
    “It always was,” said May, amazed at her own courage. “Never was any good.”
    Mrs. Porter smiled again, with even more grimness, and said, with meaning, “You ought to know, should you not, Mrs.—Watson?”
    “I certainly do,” said May, and bitterness came to her and she was sick with it.
    The flush on the woman’s face became scarlet and the milky eyes glared. “What did