The Last Leaf

Two friends, one illness. Two young artists, Sue and Johnsy, shared a little flat at the top of an old house. In November Johnsy fell ill with pneumonia and lay staring out of the window. The doctor said she had decided she would not get well, and medicine cannot help someone who does not want to live.

Counting leaves. Johnsy counted the ivy leaves falling from the creeper on the wall opposite. When the last leaf fell, she said, she would die.

Behrman. Sue asked Behrman, an old painter downstairs who always talked of the masterpiece he would one day paint, to be her model, and told him about Johnsy. That night a storm raged. Only one leaf was left.

The leaf that would not fall. Next morning the leaf was still there, and it stayed through another stormy night. Johnsy felt ashamed of wanting to die. She ate, and began to recover. The doctor said she now had the will to live.

The secret. Then Sue told her: Behrman had died of pneumonia. He had been found wet and shivering, with a ladder, a lantern and green and yellow paints. The leaf that never fluttered in the wind was his masterpiece, painted on the wall the night the last real leaf fell.