canopy overhead, trailing its silken draperies to the floor. Pink lamps. And a polar bear rug before a fireplace. A room fit for a queen, Minnie thought, the kind of setting any woman could be absolutely happy in—provided, of course, she had the right man. Minnie could never see Billy in a room like that. Al Kessler might be at home there, but never Billy. His hands would taint the satin coverlet. She shuddered when her imagination pictured Billy's old working suit, blood-stained, lying over the back of one of those gilded chairs.
One afternoon Elsie came to see her, and when she stepped out of the murky shadows of the narrow hallway into the sunlit room, Minnie uttered a sharp cry. Elsie's face was so distorted, that Minnie, though stricken with pity for her, felt an uncontrollable impulse to laugh. One eye was discolored, her right cheek swollen and her thin lips puffed into a tragic pout.
"He beat you, the dirty swine!" Minnie cried compasionately, drawing Elsie with a swift caress into her arms. "Oh, you poor kid, you. Why didn't you hit him back, Elsie? Believe me, I'd o' killed him. . . ."
Elsie had struggled away from Minnie's embrace. "No, Min, it wasn't Pete! Honest to God! I fell down the stairs."
Minnie knew she was lying, but felt no admiration for this loyalty. The women that she had known took a personal pride in their loyalty to their men, and some of them accepted their punishment as part of a thorough martyrdom. Others welcomed abuse as a proof of their husbands' love. Michael Flynn had never struck his wife, and once Minnie overheard her mother speak of this almost regretfully, as if she had been cheated out of one of the essential pleasures of married life.
