PARTISAN REVIEW
foul-tongued he would have been shooting Cowboy at the pool hall
where they had spittoons since most of the patrons, including (God
damn him) her father, chewed tobacco.
It was no longer possible for Rose to stay in her room in the
evenings because of the busy personalities so near, and after dinner
she went back to the Samuel Sewell. The overhead light was poor
and made her eyes smart and she missed not sitting _in her wrapper
and her slippers. She was impatient with the spinster's prolonged
illness and she saw no reason why she was not taken to the hospital.
Sometimes they went on for years that way, just clinging to the
ragged edge of nothing, getting more and more querulous and bother–
some. Miss Talmadge noticed that Rose was distraught and when
she asked and Rose said that she was dissatisfied with her room,
Miss Talmadge objected with vehement sweetness, "But it is a quaint
room! It is a lovely, lovely, lovely room!" and began instantly to
dictate a stunning letter to the parent of a pupil who, in a tantrum
over nothing at all, had deliberately broken a hockey stick belonging
to the school.
One morning just before the Christmas holiday, Miss Talmadge
asked her, in her pink voice, if she would run an errand for her in
the afternoon. The girls of the fourth form wished to send a potted
plant to someone who was ill, a former matron. Rose was not sur–
prised at all when she heard that the address was Number 6 Fanueil
Lane. So important was this illness with which she lived that it did
not occur to her that there was another invalid in the town and
Miss Talmadge, never dreaming that the retired matron was the
reason she did not like her room, said, with pointless cheer, "It will
be so handy for you."
She accepted the commission with the greatest reluctance, not
only because she wanted the occupants of the other house to remain
anonymous but because, as well, she had a horror of being near old
people and she remembered a time when the fifth grade had gone
to sing Christmas carols at the old people's home. There had been a
smell of senility in the long room with its glaring linoleum and Mis–
sion benches where the old people sat fiddling with their neckties or
with pieces of holly purloined from the dining room decorations. The
last song was "We Three Kings" and by this time Rose was so sick
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