After Youth

AFTER YOUTH
By ACHMED ABDULLAH
SHE was an Irishwoman. She was sentimental and emotional. But seldom had she given way to hysteria.
But today her nerves were a quivering tangle of thin, tortured wires. Her heavy, loose-lipped mouth dropped and sagged in a pitiful downward curve. There were hectic spots on her thin, high cheek-bones, and her blue eyes were red-rimmed, smarting. The Adam's-apple in her scrawny throat moved up and down convulsively, as a ball of glass plays in a fountain. She was choking with dry sobs.
She stood in the kitchen, looking out of the window from which the torn, black mosquito-veiling was hanging in a sodden, hopeless mass. For it had rained the night before, and heavy drops had beaten in through the window. The garbage pail was a stinking abomination, overflowing with refuse, egg-shells and coffee-grounds and rancid bacon-drippings and here and there stumps of Virginia cigarettes. The shelves showed a motley collection of cheap chinaware, some blue, some white, with a gold rim, some imitation Delft, but all cracked, chipped, stained, dirty. The sour smell from the biscuit-tin which did duty as bread-box was overpowering. In the corner there was a roller-t

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