Carmella Commands
you can help me further if you will, Kate. And I want your help very much.”
“Yes, Mrs. Barrington.”
“Take your own mother now. How was I ‘high hat’ to her?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Barrington.”
“Yet you know that I was, in some way?”
“My mother, she did not like it. Other women, they do not like it.”
“But,” said Mrs. Barrington, honestly bewildered, “don’t they want to be helped?”
Carmella, who had been sitting opposite Mrs. Barrington, jumped to her feet and planted them far apart, like a sailor on a choppy sea. Her careful selfrestraint blazed into sudden wrath.
“‘Help!’” she cried. “Help? What help? You try to teach my mother what she already knows. You teach her! Teach her? You can’t teach my mother. She could teach you.
“She don’t know maybe American. But she knows to sew. She knows lace. Yes! She could teach you. Why don’t you learn something? Why don’t you learn to make lace? Why don’t you let my mother help you? She knows, my mother does.
“Why you always sit and think you do fine job when you just come and sit and smile—and smile down to us? My mother she could teach you lace in return for you teach her American. But you! Ho-ho! You
[56]
