Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue

streaked with coal dust, was shaking up the furnace. “Will you please give me back my purse? There isn’t any money in it. It was a present, and I don’t want to lose it.”
    The janitress turned without straightening up and peered at her with hot flickering eyes, a red light from the furnace reflected in them. “What do you mean, your purse?”
    “The gold cloth purse you took from the wooden bench in my room,” she said. “I must have it back.”
    “Before God I never laid eyes on your purse, and that’s the holy truth,” said the janitress.
    “Oh, well then, keep it,” she said, but in a very bitter voice; “keep it if you want it so much.” And she walked away.
    She remembered how she had never locked a door in her life, on some principle of rejection in her that made her uncomfortable in the ownership of things, and her paradoxical boast before the warnings of her friends, that she had never lost a penny by theft; and she had been pleased with the bleak humility of this concrete example designed to illustrate and justify a certain fixed, otherwise baseless and general faith which ordered the movements of her life without regard to her will in the matter.
    In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with; bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark inexplicable death of love—all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.
    The janitress was following her upstairs with the purse in her hand and the same deep red fire flickering in her eyes. The janitress thrust the purse towards her while they were still a half dozen steps apart, and said: “Don’t never tell on me. I musta been crazy. I get crazy in the head sometimes, I swear I do. My son can tell you.”
    She took the purse after a moment, and the janitress went on: “I got a niece who is going on seventeen, and she’s a nice girl and I thought I’d give it to her. She needs a pretty purse. I musta been crazy; I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind, you leave things around and don’t seem to notice much.”
    She said: “I missed this because it was a present to me from someone. . .”
    The janitress said: “He’d get you another if you lost this one. My niece is young and needs pretty things, we oughta give the young ones a chance. She’s got young men after her maybe will want to marry her. She oughta have nice things. She needs them bad right now. You’re a grown woman, you’ve had your chance, you ought to know how it is!”
    She held the purse out to the janitress saying: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Here, take it, I’ve changed my mind. I really don’t want it.”
    The janitress looked up at her with hatred and said: “I don’t want it either now. My niece is young and pretty, she don’t need fixin’ up to be pretty, she’s young and pretty anyhow! I guess you need it worse than she does!”
    “It wasn’t really yours in the first place,” she said, turning away. “You mustn’t talk as if I had stolen it from you.”
    “It’s not from me, it’s from her you’re stealing it,” said the janitress, and went back downstairs.
    She laid the purse on the table and sat down with the cup of chilled coffee, and thought: I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

That Tree
    H E had really wanted to be a cheerful bum lying under a tree in a good climate, writing poetry. He wrote bushel basketsful of poetry and it was all no