But she turned her hopeless eyes again upon the little, squalid, quivering thing in her lap, and paid no more heed to him.

She let Jerome examine the child, with a strange apathy.

There was no hope, and consequently no power of effort, left in her.
When Jerome brought some medicine in a spoon, she assisted him to feed the child with it, but mechanically, and as if she had no interest.

Her sharp right elbow shone like a knob of ivory through a great rent in her sleeve; her dress was unfastened, and there was a gleam of white flesh through the opening; she neither knew nor cared.
There was no consciousness of self, no pride and no shame for self, in her; she had ceased to live in the fullest sense; she was nothing but the concentration of one emotion of despairing motherhood.
She heard Jerome and her husband moving about in the next room, she heard the crackling of fire in the stove, the clinking din of dishes, the scrape of a broom, not realizing in the least what the sounds meant.

She heard with her mind no sound of earth but the wail of the sick baby in her lap.
Jerome Edwards could tidy a house as well as a woman, and John Upham followed his directions with clumsy zeal.