Harriett was not impressed. “For what? To spend her life in Mrs. Rice’s kitchen?” She shrugged her shoulders.

“What you bring yo’ suit-case home fo’?”

“I’m quitting the job Saturday,” she said. “I’ve told them already.”

“Quitting!” her mother exclaimed. “What fo’? Lawd, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another!”

“What for?” Harriett retorted angrily. “There’s plenty what for! All that work for five dollars a week with what little tips those pikers give you. And white men insulting you besides, asking you to sleep with ’em. Look at my finger-nails, all broke from scrubbing that dining-room floor.” She thrust out her dark slim hands. “Waiting table and cleaning silver, washing and ironing table-linen, and then scrubbing the floor besides—that’s too much of a good thing! And only three waitresses on the job. That old steward out there’s a regular white folks’ nigger. He don’t care how hard he works us girls. Well, I’m through with the swell new Stanton County Country Club this coming Saturday—I’m telling everybody!” She shrugged her shoulders again.

“What you gonna do then?”

“Maudel says I can get a job with her.”

“Maudel? . . . Where?” The old woman had begun to wring the clothes dry and pile them in a large dish-pan.

“At the Banks Hotel, chambermaid, for pretty good pay.”

Hager stopped again and turned decisively towards her daughter. “You ain’t gonna work in no hotel. You hear me! They’s dives o’ sin, that’s what they is, an’ a child o’ mine ain’t goin’ in one. If you was a boy, I wouldn’t let you go, much less a girl! They ain’t nothin’ but strumpets works in hotels.”

“Maudel’s no strumpet.” Harriett’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t know if she is or ain’t, but I knows I wants you to stop runnin’ with her—I done tole you befo’. . . . Her mammy ain’t none too straight neither, raisin’ them chillen in sin. Look at Sammy in de reform school ’fore he were fifteen for gamblin’. An’ de oldest chile, Essie, done gone to Kansas City with that yaller devil she ain’t married. An’ Maudel runnin’ de streets night an’ day, with you tryin’ to keep up with her! . . . Lawd a mercy! . . . Here, hang up these clothes!”

Her mother pointed to the tin pan on the table filled with damp, twisted, white underwear. Harriett took the pan in both hands. It was heavy and she trembled with anger as she lifted it to her shoulders.

“You can bark at me if you want to, mama, but don’t talk about my friends. I don’t care what they are! Maudel’d do anything for me. And her brother’s a good kid, whether he’s been in reform school or not. They oughtn’t to put him there just for shooting dice. What’s that? I like him, and I like Mrs. Smothers, too. She’s not always scolding people for wanting a good time and for being lively and trying to be happy.”

Hot tears raced down each cheek, leaving moist lines in the pink powder. Sandy, playing marbles with Buster under the apple-tree, heard her sniffling as she shook out the clothes and hung them on the line in the yard.