"Do you like them there?" She asks. She points to a cluster of fancy
headstones.

"Do you?" I ask.

She smiles.

"Oh yes," she says. And she stops. She is admiring the tombstones. We walk
on.

It is incredible. This blousy one, this dull-eyed one has come to the
cemetery on her day off--to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a
poignant kind. Let us pray God there is nothing pathologic here and that
this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the
rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might dream of
fine dresses.

Yes, at last we are on the track. We talk. These are very pretty, she
says. Life is dull. The days are drab. The place where she works is like
an oven. There is nothing pretty to look at--even in mirrors there is
nothing cool and pretty. Clothes grow lumpy when she puts them on. Boys
giggle and call names when she goes out. And so, outcast, she comes here
to the cemetery to dream of a day when something cool and pretty will
belong to her. A headstone, perhaps a stately one with a figure above it.
It will stand over her. She will be dead then and unable to enjoy it. But
now she is alive. Now she can think of how pretty the stone will look and
thus enjoy it in advance. This, after all, is the technique of all dreams.

We grow confidential. I have asked what sort she likes best, what sort it
pleases her most to think about as standing over her grave when she dies.