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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 447 ***
+
+
+
+
+MAGGIE:  A GIRL OF THE STREETS
+
+BY
+
+STEPHEN CRANE
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum
+Alley.  He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who
+were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.
+
+His infantile countenance was livid with fury.  His small body was
+writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.
+
+"Run, Jimmie, run!  Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley
+child.
+
+"Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me
+run."
+
+Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil's Row throats.  Tattered
+gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap.  On
+their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins.
+As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.
+
+The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other
+side.  His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was
+gone.  He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was
+dripping from a cut in his head.  His wan features wore a look of a
+tiny, insane demon.
+
+On the ground, children from Devil's Row closed in on their antagonist.
+He crooked his left arm defensively about his head and fought with
+cursing fury.  The little boys ran to and fro, dodging, hurling stones
+and swearing in barbaric trebles.
+
+From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid
+squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman.  Some laborers,
+unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and
+regarded the fight.  The engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a
+railing and watched.  Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts
+came from the shadow of a building and crawled slowly along the river's
+bank.
+
+A stone had smashed into Jimmie's mouth.  Blood was bubbling over his
+chin and down upon his ragged shirt.  Tears made furrows on his
+dirt-stained cheeks.  His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak,
+causing his small body to reel.  His roaring curses of the first part
+of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter.
+
+In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil's Row children there were
+notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery.  The little boys seemed
+to leer gloatingly at the blood upon the other child's face.
+
+Down the avenue came boastfully sauntering a lad of sixteen years,
+although the chronic sneer of an ideal manhood already sat upon his
+lips.  His hat was tipped with an air of challenge over his eye.
+Between his teeth, a cigar stump was tilted at the angle of defiance.
+He walked with a certain swing of the shoulders which appalled the
+timid.  He glanced over into the vacant lot in which the little raving
+boys from Devil's Row seethed about the shrieking and tearful child
+from Rum Alley.
+
+"Gee!" he murmured with interest.  "A scrap.  Gee!"
+
+He strode over to the cursing circle, swinging his shoulders in a
+manner which denoted that he held victory in his fists.  He approached
+at the back of one of the most deeply engaged of the Devil's Row
+children.
+
+"Ah, what deh hell," he said, and smote the deeply-engaged one on the
+back of the head.  The little boy fell to the ground and gave a hoarse,
+tremendous howl.  He scrambled to his feet, and perceiving, evidently,
+the size of his assailant, ran quickly off, shouting alarms.  The
+entire Devil's Row party followed him.  They came to a stand a short
+distance away and yelled taunting oaths at the boy with the chronic
+sneer.  The latter, momentarily, paid no attention to them.
+
+"What deh hell, Jimmie?" he asked of the small champion.
+
+Jimmie wiped his blood-wet features with his sleeve.
+
+"Well, it was dis way, Pete, see!  I was goin' teh lick dat Riley kid
+and dey all pitched on me."
+
+Some Rum Alley children now came forward.  The party stood for a moment
+exchanging vainglorious remarks with Devil's Row.  A few stones were
+thrown at long distances, and words of challenge passed between small
+warriors.  Then the Rum Alley contingent turned slowly in the direction
+of their home street.  They began to give, each to each, distorted
+versions of the fight.  Causes of retreat in particular cases were
+magnified.  Blows dealt in the fight were enlarged to catapultian
+power, and stones thrown were alleged to have hurtled with infinite
+accuracy.  Valor grew strong again, and the little boys began to swear
+with great spirit.
+
+"Ah, we blokies kin lick deh hull damn Row," said a child, swaggering.
+
+Little Jimmie was striving to stanch the flow of blood from his cut
+lips.  Scowling, he turned upon the speaker.
+
+"Ah, where deh hell was yeh when I was doin' all deh fightin?" he
+demanded.  "Youse kids makes me tired."
+
+"Ah, go ahn," replied the other argumentatively.
+
+Jimmie replied with heavy contempt.  "Ah, youse can't fight, Blue
+Billie!  I kin lick yeh wid one han'."
+
+"Ah, go ahn," replied Billie again.
+
+"Ah," said Jimmie threateningly.
+
+"Ah," said the other in the same tone.
+
+They struck at each other, clinched, and rolled over on the cobble
+stones.
+
+"Smash 'im, Jimmie, kick deh damn guts out of 'im," yelled Pete, the
+lad with the chronic sneer, in tones of delight.
+
+The small combatants pounded and kicked, scratched and tore.  They
+began to weep and their curses struggled in their throats with sobs.
+The other little boys clasped their hands and wriggled their legs in
+excitement.  They formed a bobbing circle about the pair.
+
+A tiny spectator was suddenly agitated.
+
+"Cheese it, Jimmie, cheese it!  Here comes yer fader," he yelled.
+
+The circle of little boys instantly parted.  They drew away and waited
+in ecstatic awe for that which was about to happen.  The two little
+boys fighting in the modes of four thousand years ago, did not hear the
+warning.
+
+Up the avenue there plodded slowly a man with sullen eyes.  He was
+carrying a dinner pail and smoking an apple-wood pipe.
+
+As he neared the spot where the little boys strove, he regarded them
+listlessly.  But suddenly he roared an oath and advanced upon the
+rolling fighters.
+
+"Here, you Jim, git up, now, while I belt yer life out, you damned
+disorderly brat."
+
+He began to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground.  The boy Billie
+felt a heavy boot strike his head.  He made a furious effort and
+disentangled himself from Jimmie.  He tottered away, damning.
+
+Jimmie arose painfully from the ground and confronting his father,
+began to curse him.  His parent kicked him.  "Come home, now," he
+cried, "an' stop yer jawin', er I'll lam the everlasting head off yehs."
+
+They departed.  The man paced placidly along with the apple-wood emblem
+of serenity between his teeth.  The boy followed a dozen feet in the
+rear.  He swore luridly, for he felt that it was degradation for one
+who aimed to be some vague soldier, or a man of blood with a sort of
+sublime license, to be taken home by a father.
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+Eventually they entered into a dark region where, from a careening
+building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the
+street and the gutter.  A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from
+cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows.  Long streamers of
+garments fluttered from fire-escapes.  In all unhandy places there were
+buckets, brooms, rags and bottles.  In the street infants played or
+fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles.
+Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped
+while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels.  Withered
+persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking
+pipes in obscure corners.  A thousand odors of cooking food came forth
+to the street.  The building quivered and creaked from the weight of
+humanity stamping about in its bowels.
+
+A small ragged girl dragged a red, bawling infant along the crowded
+ways.  He was hanging back, baby-like, bracing his wrinkled, bare legs.
+
+The little girl cried out: "Ah, Tommie, come ahn.  Dere's Jimmie and
+fader.  Don't be a-pullin' me back."
+
+She jerked the baby's arm impatiently.  He fell on his face, roaring.
+With a second jerk she pulled him to his feet, and they went on.  With
+the obstinacy of his order, he protested against being dragged in a
+chosen direction.  He made heroic endeavors to keep on his legs,
+denounce his sister and consume a bit of orange peeling which he chewed
+between the times of his infantile orations.
+
+As the sullen-eyed man, followed by the blood-covered boy, drew near,
+the little girl burst into reproachful cries.  "Ah, Jimmie, youse bin
+fightin' agin."
+
+The urchin swelled disdainfully.
+
+"Ah, what deh hell, Mag.  See?"
+
+The little girl upbraided him,  "Youse allus fightin', Jimmie, an' yeh
+knows it puts mudder out when yehs come home half dead, an' it's like
+we'll all get a poundin'."
+
+She began to weep.  The babe threw back his head and roared at his
+prospects.
+
+"Ah, what deh hell!" cried Jimmie.  "Shut up er I'll smack yer mout'.
+See?"
+
+As his sister continued her lamentations, he suddenly swore and struck
+her.  The little girl reeled and, recovering herself, burst into tears
+and quaveringly cursed him.  As she slowly retreated her brother
+advanced dealing her cuffs.  The father heard and turned about.
+
+"Stop that, Jim, d'yeh hear?  Leave yer sister alone on the street.
+It's like I can never beat any sense into yer damned wooden head."
+
+The urchin raised his voice in defiance to his parent and continued his
+attacks.  The babe bawled tremendously, protesting with great violence.
+During his sister's hasty manoeuvres, he was dragged by the arm.
+
+Finally the procession plunged into one of the gruesome doorways.  They
+crawled up dark stairways and along cold, gloomy halls.  At last the
+father pushed open a door and they entered a lighted room in which a
+large woman was rampant.
+
+She stopped in a career from a seething stove to a pan-covered table.
+As the father and children filed in she peered at them.
+
+"Eh, what?  Been fightin' agin, by Gawd!"  She threw herself upon
+Jimmie.  The urchin tried to dart behind the others and in the scuffle
+the babe, Tommie, was knocked down.  He protested with his usual
+vehemence, because they had bruised his tender shins against a table
+leg.
+
+The mother's massive shoulders heaved with anger.  Grasping the urchin
+by the neck and shoulder she shook him until he rattled.  She dragged
+him to an unholy sink, and, soaking a rag in water, began to scrub his
+lacerated face with it.  Jimmie screamed in pain and tried to twist his
+shoulders out of the clasp of the huge arms.
+
+The babe sat on the floor watching the scene, his face in contortions
+like that of a woman at a tragedy.  The father, with a newly-ladened
+pipe in his mouth, crouched on a backless chair near the stove.
+Jimmie's cries annoyed him.  He turned about and bellowed at his wife:
+
+"Let the damned kid alone for a minute, will yeh, Mary?  Yer allus
+poundin' 'im.  When I come nights I can't git no rest 'cause yer allus
+poundin' a kid.  Let up, d'yeh hear?  Don't be allus poundin' a kid."
+
+The woman's operations on the urchin instantly increased in violence.
+At last she tossed him to a corner where he limply lay cursing and
+weeping.
+
+The wife put her immense hands on her hips and with a chieftain-like
+stride approached her husband.
+
+"Ho," she said, with a great grunt of contempt.  "An' what in the devil
+are you stickin' your nose for?"
+
+The babe crawled under the table and, turning, peered out cautiously.
+The ragged girl retreated and the urchin in the corner drew his legs
+carefully beneath him.
+
+The man puffed his pipe calmly and put his great mudded boots on the
+back part of the stove.
+
+"Go teh hell," he murmured, tranquilly.
+
+The woman screamed and shook her fists before her husband's eyes.  The
+rough yellow of her face and neck flared suddenly crimson.  She began
+to howl.
+
+He puffed imperturbably at his pipe for a time, but finally arose and
+began to look out at the window into the darkening chaos of back yards.
+
+"You've been drinkin', Mary," he said.  "You'd better let up on the
+bot', ol' woman, or you'll git done."
+
+"You're a liar.  I ain't had a drop," she roared in reply.
+
+They had a lurid altercation, in which they damned each other's souls
+with frequence.
+
+The babe was staring out from under the table, his small face working
+in his excitement.
+
+The ragged girl went stealthily over to the corner where the urchin lay.
+
+"Are yehs hurted much, Jimmie?" she whispered timidly.
+
+"Not a damn bit!  See?" growled the little boy.
+
+"Will I wash deh blood?"
+
+"Naw!"
+
+"Will I--"
+
+"When I catch dat Riley kid I'll break 'is face!  Dat's right!  See?"
+
+He turned his face to the wall as if resolved to grimly bide his time.
+
+In the quarrel between husband and wife, the woman was victor.  The man
+grabbed his hat and rushed from the room, apparently determined upon a
+vengeful drunk.  She followed to the door and thundered at him as he
+made his way down stairs.
+
+She returned and stirred up the room until her children were bobbing
+about like bubbles.
+
+"Git outa deh way," she persistently bawled, waving feet with their
+dishevelled shoes near the heads of her children.  She shrouded
+herself, puffing and snorting, in a cloud of steam at the stove, and
+eventually extracted a frying-pan full of potatoes that hissed.
+
+She flourished it.  "Come teh yer suppers, now," she cried with sudden
+exasperation.  "Hurry up, now, er I'll help yeh!"
+
+The children scrambled hastily.  With prodigious clatter they arranged
+themselves at table.  The babe sat with his feet dangling high from a
+precarious infant chair and gorged his small stomach.  Jimmie forced,
+with feverish rapidity, the grease-enveloped pieces between his wounded
+lips.  Maggie, with side glances of fear of interruption, ate like a
+small pursued tigress.
+
+The mother sat blinking at them.  She delivered reproaches, swallowed
+potatoes and drank from a yellow-brown bottle.  After a time her mood
+changed and she wept as she carried little Tommie into another room and
+laid him to sleep with his fists doubled in an old quilt of faded red
+and green grandeur.  Then she came and moaned by the stove.  She rocked
+to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably to the
+two children about their "poor mother" and "yer fader, damn 'is soul."
+
+The little girl plodded between the table and the chair with a dish-pan
+on it.  She tottered on her small legs beneath burdens of dishes.
+
+Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds.  He cast furtive glances at his
+mother.  His practised eye perceived her gradually emerge from a
+muddled mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken heat.  He
+sat breathless.
+
+Maggie broke a plate.
+
+The mother started to her feet as if propelled.
+
+"Good Gawd," she howled.  Her eyes glittered on her child with sudden
+hatred.  The fervent red of her face turned almost to purple.  The
+little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.
+
+He floundered about in darkness until he found the stairs.  He
+stumbled, panic-stricken, to the next floor.  An old woman opened a
+door.  A light behind her threw a flare on the urchin's quivering face.
+
+"Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time?  Is yer fader beatin' yer
+mudder, or yer mudder beatin' yer fader?"
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall.  Above the muffled
+roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the
+thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound
+of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels
+over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the
+mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering.
+
+The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at
+will, an expression of great virtue.  She possessed a small music-box
+capable of one tune, and a collection of "God bless yehs" pitched in
+assorted keys of fervency.  Each day she took a position upon the
+stones of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and
+crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol.  She received daily a
+small sum in pennies.  It was contributed, for the most part, by
+persons who did not make their homes in that vicinity.
+
+Once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk, the gnarled
+woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with great dexterity beneath her
+cloak.  When she was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial
+swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism, had almost
+kicked the stomach out of a huge policeman whose conduct upon that
+occasion she referred to when she said: "The police, damn 'em."
+
+"Eh, Jimmie, it's cursed shame," she said.  "Go, now, like a dear an'
+buy me a can, an' if yer mudder raises 'ell all night yehs can sleep
+here."
+
+Jimmie took a tendered tin-pail and seven pennies and departed.  He
+passed into the side door of a saloon and went to the bar.  Straining
+up on his toes he raised the pail and pennies as high as his arms would
+let him.  He saw two hands thrust down and take them.  Directly the
+same hands let down the filled pail and he left.
+
+In front of the gruesome doorway he met a lurching figure.  It was his
+father, swaying about on uncertain legs.
+
+"Give me deh can.  See?" said the man, threateningly.
+
+"Ah, come off!  I got dis can fer dat ol' woman an' it 'ud be dirt teh
+swipe it.  See?" cried Jimmie.
+
+The father wrenched the pail from the urchin.  He grasped it in both
+hands and lifted it to his mouth.  He glued his lips to the under edge
+and tilted his head.  His hairy throat swelled until it seemed to grow
+near his chin.  There was a tremendous gulping movement and the beer
+was gone.
+
+The man caught his breath and laughed.  He hit his son on the head with
+the empty pail.  As it rolled clanging into the street, Jimmie began to
+scream and kicked repeatedly at his father's shins.
+
+"Look at deh dirt what yeh done me," he yelled.  "Deh ol' woman 'ill be
+raisin' hell."
+
+He retreated to the middle of the street, but the man did not pursue.
+He staggered toward the door.
+
+"I'll club hell outa yeh when I ketch yeh," he shouted, and disappeared.
+
+During the evening he had been standing against a bar drinking whiskies
+and declaring to all comers, confidentially: "My home reg'lar livin'
+hell!  Damndes' place!  Reg'lar hell!  Why do I come an' drin' whisk'
+here thish way?  'Cause home reg'lar livin' hell!"
+
+Jimmie waited a long time in the street and then crept warily up
+through the building.  He passed with great caution the door of the
+gnarled woman, and finally stopped outside his home and listened.
+
+He could hear his mother moving heavily about among the furniture of
+the room.  She was chanting in a mournful voice, occasionally
+interjecting bursts of volcanic wrath at the father, who, Jimmie
+judged, had sunk down on the floor or in a corner.
+
+"Why deh blazes don' chere try teh keep Jim from fightin'?  I'll break
+her jaw," she suddenly bellowed.
+
+The man mumbled with drunken indifference.  "Ah, wha' deh hell.  W'a's
+odds?  Wha' makes kick?"
+
+"Because he tears 'is clothes, yeh damn fool," cried the woman in
+supreme wrath.
+
+The husband seemed to become aroused.  "Go teh hell," he thundered
+fiercely in reply.  There was a crash against the door and something
+broke into clattering fragments.  Jimmie partially suppressed a howl
+and darted down the stairway.  Below he paused and listened.  He heard
+howls and curses, groans and shrieks, confusingly in chorus as if a
+battle were raging.  With all was the crash of splintering furniture.
+The eyes of the urchin glared in fear that one of them would discover
+him.
+
+Curious faces appeared in doorways, and whispered comments passed to
+and fro.  "Ol' Johnson's raisin' hell agin."
+
+Jimmie stood until the noises ceased and the other inhabitants of the
+tenement had all yawned and shut their doors.  Then he crawled upstairs
+with the caution of an invader of a panther den.  Sounds of labored
+breathing came through the broken door-panels.  He pushed the door open
+and entered, quaking.
+
+A glow from the fire threw red hues over the bare floor, the cracked
+and soiled plastering, and the overturned and broken furniture.
+
+In the middle of the floor lay his mother asleep.  In one corner of the
+room his father's limp body hung across the seat of a chair.
+
+The urchin stole forward.  He began to shiver in dread of awakening his
+parents.  His mother's great chest was heaving painfully.  Jimmie
+paused and looked down at her.  Her face was inflamed and swollen from
+drinking.  Her yellow brows shaded eyelids that had brown blue.  Her
+tangled hair tossed in waves over her forehead.  Her mouth was set in
+the same lines of vindictive hatred that it had, perhaps, borne during
+the fight.  Her bare, red arms were thrown out above her head in
+positions of exhaustion, something, mayhap, like those of a sated
+villain.
+
+The urchin bended over his mother.  He was fearful lest she should open
+her eyes, and the dread within him was so strong, that he could not
+forbear to stare, but hung as if fascinated over the woman's grim face.
+
+Suddenly her eyes opened.  The urchin found himself looking straight
+into that expression, which, it would seem, had the power to change his
+blood to salt.  He howled piercingly and fell backward.
+
+The woman floundered for a moment, tossed her arms about her head as if
+in combat, and again began to snore.
+
+Jimmie crawled back in the shadows and waited.  A noise in the next
+room had followed his cry at the discovery that his mother was awake.
+He grovelled in the gloom, the eyes from out his drawn face riveted
+upon the intervening door.
+
+He heard it creak, and then the sound of a small voice came to him.
+"Jimmie!  Jimmie!  Are yehs dere?" it whispered.  The urchin started.
+The thin, white face of his sister looked at him from the door-way of
+the other room.  She crept to him across the floor.
+
+The father had not moved, but lay in the same death-like sleep.  The
+mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in
+the agonies of strangulation.  Out at the window a florid moon was
+peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river
+glimmered pallidly.
+
+The small frame of the ragged girl was quivering.  Her features were
+haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear.  She grasped the
+urchin's arm in her little trembling hands and they huddled in a
+corner.  The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the
+woman's face, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends
+would come from below.
+
+They crouched until the ghost-mists of dawn appeared at the window,
+drawing close to the panes, and looking in at the prostrate, heaving
+body of the mother.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+The babe, Tommie, died.  He went away in a white, insignificant coffin,
+his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl, Maggie, had
+stolen from an Italian.
+
+She and Jimmie lived.
+
+The inexperienced fibres of the boy's eyes were hardened at an early
+age.  He became a young man of leather.  He lived some red years
+without laboring.  During that time his sneer became chronic.  He
+studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he
+thought he had reason to believe it.  He never conceived a respect for
+the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed.
+
+He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at a
+mission church where a man composed his sermons of "yous." While they
+got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he calculated
+they stood with the Lord.  Many of the sinners were impatient over the
+pictured depths of their degradation.  They were waiting for
+soup-tickets.
+
+A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the
+portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his
+hearers.
+
+"You are damned," said the preacher.  And the reader of sounds might
+have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: "Where's our soup?"
+
+Jimmie and a companion sat in a rear seat and commented upon the things
+that didn't concern them, with all the freedom of English gentlemen.
+When they grew thirsty and went out their minds confused the speaker
+with Christ.
+
+Momentarily, Jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopeless altitude
+where grew fruit.  His companion said that if he should ever meet God
+he would ask for a million dollars and a bottle of beer.
+
+Jimmie's occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcorners and
+watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of
+pretty women.  He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets.
+
+On the corners he was in life and of life.  The world was going on and
+he was there to perceive it.
+
+He maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men.  To
+him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered
+faint hearts.  He and his order were kings, to a certain extent, over
+the men of untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps,
+to be either killed or laughed at.
+
+Above all things he despised obvious Christians and ciphers with the
+chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes.  He considered
+himself above both of these classes.  He was afraid of neither the
+devil nor the leader of society.
+
+When he had a dollar in his pocket his satisfaction with existence was
+the greatest thing in the world.  So, eventually, he felt obliged to
+work.  His father died and his mother's years were divided up into
+periods of thirty days.
+
+He became a truck driver.  He was given the charge of a painstaking
+pair of horses and a large rattling truck.  He invaded the turmoil and
+tumble of the down-town streets and learned to breathe maledictory
+defiance at the police who occasionally used to climb up, drag him from
+his perch and beat him.
+
+In the lower part of the city he daily involved himself in hideous
+tangles.  If he and his team chanced to be in the rear he preserved a
+demeanor of serenity, crossing his legs and bursting forth into yells
+when foot passengers took dangerous dives beneath the noses of his
+champing horses.  He smoked his pipe calmly for he knew that his pay
+was marching on.
+
+If in the front and the key-truck of chaos, he entered terrifically
+into the quarrel that was raging to and fro among the drivers on their
+high seats, and sometimes roared oaths and violently got himself
+arrested.
+
+After a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all
+things.  He became so sharp that he believed in nothing.  To him the
+police were always actuated by malignant impulses and the rest of the
+world was composed, for the most part, of despicable creatures who were
+all trying to take advantage of him and with whom, in defense, he was
+obliged to quarrel on all possible occasions.  He himself occupied a
+down-trodden position that had a private but distinct element of
+grandeur in its isolation.
+
+The most complete cases of aggravated idiocy were, to his mind, rampant
+upon the front platforms of all the street cars.  At first his tongue
+strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior.  He became
+immured like an African cow.  In him grew a majestic contempt for those
+strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs.
+
+He fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of fixing his
+eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to begin, and
+then going into a sort of a trance of observation.  Multitudes of
+drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers might load him with
+opprobrium, he would not awaken until some blue policeman turned red
+and began to frenziedly tear bridles and beat the soft noses of the
+responsible horses.
+
+When he paused to contemplate the attitude of the police toward himself
+and his fellows, he believed that they were the only men in the city
+who had no rights.  When driving about, he felt that he was held liable
+by the police for anything that might occur in the streets, and was the
+common prey of all energetic officials.  In revenge, he resolved never
+to move out of the way of anything, until formidable circumstances, or
+a much larger man than himself forced him to it.
+
+Foot-passengers were mere pestering flies with an insane disregard for
+their legs and his convenience.  He could not conceive their maniacal
+desires to cross the streets.  Their madness smote him with eternal
+amazement.  He was continually storming at them from his throne.  He
+sat aloft and denounced their frantic leaps, plunges, dives and
+straddles.
+
+When they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of his champing horses,
+making them swing their heads and move their feet, disturbing a solid
+dreamy repose, he swore at the men as fools, for he himself could
+perceive that Providence had caused it clearly to be written, that he
+and his team had the unalienable right to stand in the proper path of
+the sun chariot, and if they so minded, obstruct its mission or take a
+wheel off.
+
+And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire to step
+down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute the right of
+way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by a scowling
+mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles.
+
+It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would have derided, in an
+axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferry boat.  Yet he achieved
+a respect for a fire engine.  As one charged toward his truck, he would
+drive fearfully upon a sidewalk, threatening untold people with
+annihilation.  When an engine would strike a mass of blocked trucks,
+splitting it into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice,
+Jimmie's team could usually be observed high and safe, with whole
+wheels, on the sidewalk.  The fearful coming of the engine could break
+up the most intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had
+been swearing for the half of an hour.
+
+A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he
+loved with a distant dog-like devotion.  They had been known to
+overturn street-cars.  Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the
+cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired.
+The clang of the gong pierced his breast like a noise of remembered war.
+
+When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested.  Before he
+reached a great age, he had a fair record.
+
+He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and
+fight with other drivers.  He had been in quite a number of
+miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become
+known to the police.  Once he had been arrested for assaulting a
+Chinaman.  Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely
+unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking
+forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about
+marriage and support and infants.
+
+Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly
+and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.  She grew to be a most
+rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.
+
+None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins.  The
+philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over
+it.
+
+When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt
+disguised her.  Attired in tatters and grime, she went unseen.
+
+There came a time, however, when the young men of the vicinity said:
+"Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker."  About this period her
+brother remarked to her: "Mag, I'll tell yeh dis!  See?  Yeh've edder
+got teh go teh hell or go teh work!"  Whereupon she went to work,
+having the feminine aversion of going to hell.
+
+By a chance, she got a position in an establishment where they made
+collars and cuffs.  She received a stool and a machine in a room where
+sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent.  She perched
+on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars,
+the name of whose brand could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything
+in connection with collars.  At night she returned home to her mother.
+
+Jimmie grew large enough to take the vague position of head of the
+family.  As incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs late at
+night, as his father had done before him.  He reeled about the room,
+swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.
+
+The mother had gradually arisen to that degree of fame that she could
+bandy words with her acquaintances among the police-justices.
+Court-officials called her by her first name.  When she appeared they
+pursued a course which had been theirs for months.  They invariably
+grinned and cried out: "Hello, Mary, you here again?"  Her grey head
+wagged in many a court.  She always besieged the bench with voluble
+excuses, explanations, apologies and prayers.  Her flaming face and
+rolling eyes were a sort of familiar sight on the island.  She measured
+time by means of sprees, and was eternally swollen and dishevelled.
+
+One day the young man, Pete, who as a lad had smitten the Devil's Row
+urchin in the back of the head and put to flight the antagonists of his
+friend, Jimmie, strutted upon the scene.  He met Jimmie one day on the
+street, promised to take him to a boxing match in Williamsburg, and
+called for him in the evening.
+
+Maggie observed Pete.
+
+He sat on a table in the Johnson home and dangled his checked legs with
+an enticing nonchalance.  His hair was curled down over his forehead in
+an oiled bang.  His rather pugged nose seemed to revolt from contact
+with a bristling moustache of short, wire-like hairs.  His blue
+double-breasted coat, edged with black braid, buttoned close to a red
+puff tie, and his patent-leather shoes looked like murder-fitted
+weapons.
+
+His mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of his
+personal superiority.  There was valor and contempt for circumstances
+in the glance of his eye.  He waved his hands like a man of the world,
+who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says "Fudge."  He had
+certainly seen everything and with each curl of his lip, he declared
+that it amounted to nothing.  Maggie thought he must be a very elegant
+and graceful bartender.
+
+He was telling tales to Jimmie.
+
+Maggie watched him furtively, with half-closed eyes, lit with a vague
+interest.
+
+"Hully gee!  Dey makes me tired," he said.  "Mos' e'ry day some farmer
+comes in an' tries teh run deh shop.  See?  But dey gits t'rowed right
+out!  I jolt dem right out in deh street before dey knows where dey is!
+See?"
+
+"Sure," said Jimmie.
+
+"Dere was a mug come in deh place deh odder day wid an idear he wus
+goin' teh own deh place!  Hully gee, he wus goin' teh own deh place!  I
+see he had a still on an' I didn' wanna giv 'im no stuff, so I says:
+'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble,' I says like dat!
+See?  'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble'; like dat.
+'Git deh hell outa here,' I says.  See?"
+
+Jimmie nodded understandingly.  Over his features played an eager
+desire to state the amount of his valor in a similar crisis, but the
+narrator proceeded.
+
+"Well, deh blokie he says: 'T'hell wid it!  I ain' lookin' for no
+scrap,' he says (See?), 'but' he says, 'I'm 'spectable cit'zen an' I
+wanna drink an' purtydamnsoon, too.'  See?  'Deh hell,' I says.  Like
+dat!  'Deh hell,' I says.  See?  'Don' make no trouble,' I says.  Like
+dat.  'Don' make no trouble.'  See?  Den deh mug he squared off an'
+said he was fine as silk wid his dukes (See?) an' he wanned a drink
+damnquick.  Dat's what he said.  See?"
+
+"Sure," repeated Jimmie.
+
+Pete continued.  "Say, I jes' jumped deh bar an' deh way I plunked dat
+blokie was great.  See?  Dat's right!  In deh jaw!  See?  Hully gee, he
+t'rowed a spittoon true deh front windee.  Say, I taut I'd drop dead.
+But deh boss, he comes in after an' he says, 'Pete, yehs done jes'
+right!  Yeh've gota keep order an' it's all right.'  See?  'It's all
+right,' he says.  Dat's what he said."
+
+The two held a technical discussion.
+
+"Dat bloke was a dandy," said Pete, in conclusion, "but he hadn' oughta
+made no trouble.  Dat's what I says teh dem: 'Don' come in here an'
+make no trouble,' I says, like dat.  'Don' make no trouble.'  See?"
+
+As Jimmie and his friend exchanged tales descriptive of their prowess,
+Maggie leaned back in the shadow.  Her eyes dwelt wonderingly and
+rather wistfully upon Pete's face.  The broken furniture, grimey walls,
+and general disorder and dirt of her home of a sudden appeared before
+her and began to take a potential aspect.  Pete's aristocratic person
+looked as if it might soil.  She looked keenly at him, occasionally,
+wondering if he was feeling contempt.  But Pete seemed to be enveloped
+in reminiscence.
+
+"Hully gee," said he, "dose mugs can't phase me.  Dey knows I kin wipe
+up deh street wid any t'ree of dem."
+
+When he said, "Ah, what deh hell," his voice was burdened with disdain
+for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate might compel him
+to endure.
+
+Maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man.  Her dim
+thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says,
+the little hills sing together in the morning.  Under the trees of her
+dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+Pete took note of Maggie.
+
+"Say, Mag, I'm stuck on yer shape.  It's outa sight," he said,
+parenthetically, with an affable grin.
+
+As he became aware that she was listening closely, he grew still more
+eloquent in his descriptions of various happenings in his career.  It
+appeared that he was invincible in fights.
+
+"Why," he said, referring to a man with whom he had had a
+misunderstanding, "dat mug scrapped like a damn dago.  Dat's right.  He
+was dead easy.  See?  He tau't he was a scrapper.  But he foun' out
+diff'ent!  Hully gee."
+
+He walked to and fro in the small room, which seemed then to grow even
+smaller and unfit to hold his dignity, the attribute of a supreme
+warrior.  That swing of the shoulders that had frozen the timid when he
+was but a lad had increased with his growth and education at the ratio
+of ten to one.  It, combined with the sneer upon his mouth, told
+mankind that there was nothing in space which could appall him.  Maggie
+marvelled at him and surrounded him with greatness.  She vaguely tried
+to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have
+looked down upon her.
+
+"I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city," he said.  "I was
+goin' teh see a frien' of mine.  When I was a-crossin' deh street deh
+chump runned plump inteh me, an' den he turns aroun' an' says, 'Yer
+insolen' ruffin,' he says, like dat.  'Oh, gee,' I says, 'oh, gee, go
+teh hell and git off deh eart',' I says, like dat.  See?  'Go teh hell
+an' git off deh eart',' like dat.  Den deh blokie he got wild.  He says
+I was a contempt'ble scoun'el, er somet'ing like dat, an' he says I was
+doom' teh everlastin' pe'dition an' all like dat.  'Gee,' I says, 'gee!
+Deh hell I am,' I says.  'Deh hell I am,' like dat.  An' den I slugged
+'im.  See?"
+
+With Jimmie in his company, Pete departed in a sort of a blaze of glory
+from the Johnson home.  Maggie, leaning from the window, watched him as
+he walked down the street.
+
+Here was a formidable man who disdained the strength of a world full of
+fists.  Here was one who had contempt for brass-clothed power; one
+whose knuckles could defiantly ring against the granite of law.  He was
+a knight.
+
+The two men went from under the glimmering street-lamp and passed into
+shadows.
+
+Turning, Maggie contemplated the dark, dust-stained walls, and the
+scant and crude furniture of her home.  A clock, in a splintered and
+battered oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly regarded as an
+abomination.  She noted that it ticked raspingly.  The almost vanished
+flowers in the carpet-pattern, she conceived to be newly hideous.  Some
+faint attempts she had made with blue ribbon, to freshen the appearance
+of a dingy curtain, she now saw to be piteous.
+
+She wondered what Pete dined on.
+
+She reflected upon the collar and cuff factory.  It began to appear to
+her mind as a dreary place of endless grinding.  Pete's elegant
+occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people who had
+money and manners.  It was probable that he had a large acquaintance of
+pretty girls.  He must have great sums of money to spend.
+
+To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults.  She felt
+instant admiration for a man who openly defied it.  She thought that if
+the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, Pete would shrug his
+shoulders and say: "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes."
+
+She anticipated that he would come again shortly.  She spent some of
+her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin.
+She made it with infinite care and hung it to the slightly-careening
+mantel, over the stove, in the kitchen.  She studied it with painful
+anxiety from different points in the room.  She wanted it to look well
+on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's friend would come.  On Sunday
+night, however, Pete did not appear.
+
+Afterward the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation.  She was
+now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins.
+
+A few evenings later Pete entered with fascinating innovations in his
+apparel.  As she had seen him twice and he had different suits on each
+time, Maggie had a dim impression that his wardrobe was prodigiously
+extensive.
+
+"Say, Mag," he said, "put on yer bes' duds Friday night an' I'll take
+yehs teh deh show.  See?"
+
+He spent a few moments in flourishing his clothes and then vanished,
+without having glanced at the lambrequin.
+
+Over the eternal collars and cuffs in the factory Maggie spent the most
+of three days in making imaginary sketches of Pete and his daily
+environment.  She imagined some half dozen women in love with him and
+thought he must lean dangerously toward an indefinite one, whom she
+pictured with great charms of person, but with an altogether
+contemptible disposition.
+
+She thought he must live in a blare of pleasure.  He had friends, and
+people who were afraid of him.
+
+She saw the golden glitter of the place where Pete was to take her.  An
+entertainment of many hues and many melodies where she was afraid she
+might appear small and mouse-colored.
+
+Her mother drank whiskey all Friday morning.  With lurid face and
+tossing hair she cursed and destroyed furniture all Friday afternoon.
+When Maggie came home at half-past six her mother lay asleep amidst the
+wreck of chairs and a table.  Fragments of various household utensils
+were scattered about the floor.  She had vented some phase of drunken
+fury upon the lambrequin.  It lay in a bedraggled heap in the corner.
+
+"Hah," she snorted, sitting up suddenly, "where deh hell yeh been?  Why
+deh hell don' yeh come home earlier?  Been loafin' 'round deh streets.
+Yer gettin' teh be a reg'lar devil."
+
+When Pete arrived Maggie, in a worn black dress, was waiting for him in
+the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage.  The curtain at the window
+had been pulled by a heavy hand and hung by one tack, dangling to and
+fro in the draft through the cracks at the sash.  The knots of blue
+ribbons appeared like violated flowers.  The fire in the stove had gone
+out.  The displaced lids and open doors showed heaps of sullen grey
+ashes.  The remnants of a meal, ghastly, like dead flesh, lay in a
+corner.  Maggie's red mother, stretched on the floor, blasphemed and
+gave her daughter a bad name.
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+An orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men on an elevated
+stage near the centre of a great green-hued hall, played a popular
+waltz.  The place was crowded with people grouped about little tables.
+A battalion of waiters slid among the throng, carrying trays of beer
+glasses and making change from the inexhaustible vaults of their
+trousers pockets.  Little boys, in the costumes of French chefs,
+paraded up and down the irregular aisles vending fancy cakes.  There
+was a low rumble of conversation and a subdued clinking of glasses.
+Clouds of tobacco smoke rolled and wavered high in air about the dull
+gilt of the chandeliers.
+
+The vast crowd had an air throughout of having just quitted labor.  Men
+with calloused hands and attired in garments that showed the wear of an
+endless trudge for a living, smoked their pipes contentedly and spent
+five, ten, or perhaps fifteen cents for beer.  There was a mere
+sprinkling of kid-gloved men who smoked cigars purchased elsewhere.
+The great body of the crowd was composed of people who showed that all
+day they strove with their hands.  Quiet Germans, with maybe their
+wives and two or three children, sat listening to the music, with the
+expressions of happy cows.  An occasional party of sailors from a
+war-ship, their faces pictures of sturdy health, spent the earlier
+hours of the evening at the small round tables.  Very infrequent tipsy
+men, swollen with the value of their opinions, engaged their companions
+in earnest and confidential conversation.  In the balcony, and here and
+there below, shone the impassive faces of women.  The nationalities of
+the Bowery beamed upon the stage from all directions.
+
+Pete aggressively walked up a side aisle and took seats with Maggie at
+a table beneath the balcony.
+
+"Two beehs!"
+
+Leaning back he regarded with eyes of superiority the scene before
+them.  This attitude affected Maggie strongly.  A man who could regard
+such a sight with indifference must be accustomed to very great things.
+
+It was obvious that Pete had been to this place many times before, and
+was very familiar with it.  A knowledge of this fact made Maggie feel
+little and new.
+
+He was extremely gracious and attentive.  He displayed the
+consideration of a cultured gentleman who knew what was due.
+
+"Say, what deh hell?  Bring deh lady a big glass!  What deh hell use is
+dat pony?"
+
+"Don't be fresh, now," said the waiter, with some warmth, as he
+departed.
+
+"Ah, git off deh eart'," said Pete, after the other's retreating form.
+
+Maggie perceived that Pete brought forth all his elegance and all his
+knowledge of high-class customs for her benefit.  Her heart warmed as
+she reflected upon his condescension.
+
+The orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men gave vent to a
+few bars of anticipatory music and a girl, in a pink dress with short
+skirts, galloped upon the stage.  She smiled upon the throng as if in
+acknowledgment of a warm welcome, and began to walk to and fro, making
+profuse gesticulations and singing, in brazen soprano tones, a song,
+the words of which were inaudible.  When she broke into the swift
+rattling measures of a chorus some half-tipsy men near the stage joined
+in the rollicking refrain and glasses were pounded rhythmically upon
+the tables.  People leaned forward to watch her and to try to catch the
+words of the song.  When she vanished there were long rollings of
+applause.
+
+Obedient to more anticipatory bars, she reappeared amidst the
+half-suppressed cheering of the tipsy men.  The orchestra plunged into
+dance music and the laces of the dancer fluttered and flew in the glare
+of gas jets.  She divulged the fact that she was attired in some half
+dozen skirts.  It was patent that any one of them would have proved
+adequate for the purpose for which skirts are intended.  An occasional
+man bent forward, intent upon the pink stockings.  Maggie wondered at
+the splendor of the costume and lost herself in calculations of the
+cost of the silks and laces.
+
+The dancer's smile of stereotyped enthusiasm was turned for ten minutes
+upon the faces of her audience.  In the finale she fell into some of
+those grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the
+dancers in the theatres up-town, giving to the Bowery public the
+phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates.
+
+"Say, Pete," said Maggie, leaning forward, "dis is great."
+
+"Sure," said Pete, with proper complacence.
+
+A ventriloquist followed the dancer.  He held two fantastic dolls on
+his knees.  He made them sing mournful ditties and say funny things
+about geography and Ireland.
+
+"Do dose little men talk?" asked Maggie.
+
+"Naw," said Pete, "it's some damn fake.  See?"
+
+Two girls, on the bills as sisters, came forth and sang a duet that is
+heard occasionally at concerts given under church auspices.  They
+supplemented it with a dance which of course can never be seen at
+concerts given under church auspices.
+
+After the duettists had retired, a woman of debatable age sang a negro
+melody.  The chorus necessitated some grotesque waddlings supposed to
+be an imitation of a plantation darkey, under the influence, probably,
+of music and the moon.  The audience was just enthusiastic enough over
+it to have her return and sing a sorrowful lay, whose lines told of a
+mother's love and a sweetheart who waited and a young man who was lost
+at sea under the most harrowing circumstances.  From the faces of a
+score or so in the crowd, the self-contained look faded.  Many heads
+were bent forward with eagerness and sympathy.  As the last distressing
+sentiment of the piece was brought forth, it was greeted by that kind
+of applause which rings as sincere.
+
+As a final effort, the singer rendered some verses which described a
+vision of Britain being annihilated by America, and Ireland bursting
+her bonds.  A carefully prepared crisis was reached in the last line of
+the last verse, where the singer threw out her arms and cried, "The
+star-spangled banner."  Instantly a great cheer swelled from the
+throats of the assemblage of the masses.  There was a heavy rumble of
+booted feet thumping the floor.  Eyes gleamed with sudden fire, and
+calloused hands waved frantically in the air.
+
+After a few moments' rest, the orchestra played crashingly, and a small
+fat man burst out upon the stage.  He began to roar a song and stamp
+back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat
+and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast.  He made his face into
+fantastic grimaces until he looked like a pictured devil on a Japanese
+kite.  The crowd laughed gleefully.  His short, fat legs were never
+still a moment.  He shouted and roared and bobbed his shock of red wig
+until the audience broke out in excited applause.
+
+Pete did not pay much attention to the progress of events upon the
+stage.  He was drinking beer and watching Maggie.
+
+Her cheeks were blushing with excitement and her eyes were glistening.
+She drew deep breaths of pleasure.  No thoughts of the atmosphere of
+the collar and cuff factory came to her.
+
+When the orchestra crashed finally, they jostled their way to the
+sidewalk with the crowd.  Pete took Maggie's arm and pushed a way for
+her, offering to fight with a man or two.
+
+They reached Maggie's home at a late hour and stood for a moment in
+front of the gruesome doorway.
+
+"Say, Mag," said Pete, "give us a kiss for takin' yeh teh deh show,
+will yer?"
+
+Maggie laughed, as if startled, and drew away from him.
+
+"Naw, Pete," she said, "dat wasn't in it."
+
+"Ah, what deh hell?" urged Pete.
+
+The girl retreated nervously.
+
+"Ah, what deh hell?" repeated he.
+
+Maggie darted into the hall, and up the stairs.  She turned and smiled
+at him, then disappeared.
+
+Pete walked slowly down the street.  He had something of an astonished
+expression upon his features.  He paused under a lamp-post and breathed
+a low breath of surprise.
+
+"Gawd," he said, "I wonner if I've been played fer a duffer."
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+As thoughts of Pete came to Maggie's mind, she began to have an intense
+dislike for all of her dresses.
+
+"What deh hell ails yeh?  What makes yeh be allus fixin' and fussin'?
+Good Gawd," her mother would frequently roar at her.
+
+She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met
+on the avenues.  She envied elegance and soft palms.  She craved those
+adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving
+them to be allies of vast importance to women.
+
+Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she chanced to
+meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished and watched over
+by those they loved.
+
+The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her.  She knew
+she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot, stuffy room.  The
+begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated
+trains.  The place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors.
+
+She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room,
+mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads
+bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness,
+past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages.  She speculated how
+long her youth would endure.  She began to see the bloom upon her
+cheeks as valuable.
+
+She imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawny woman
+with an eternal grievance.  Too, she thought Pete to be a very
+fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.
+
+She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the
+oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment.  He was a
+detestable creature.  He wore white socks with low shoes.
+
+He sat all day delivering orations, in the depths of a cushioned chair.
+His pocketbook deprived them of the power to retort.
+
+"What een hell do you sink I pie fife dolla a week for? Play? No, py
+damn!" Maggie was anxious for a friend to whom she could talk about
+Pete. She would have liked to discuss his admirable mannerisms with a
+reliable mutual friend. At home, she found her mother often drunk and
+always raving. It seems that the world had treated this woman very
+badly, and she took a deep revenge upon such portions of it as came
+within her reach. She broke furniture as if she were at last getting her
+rights. She swelled with virtuous indignation as she carried the lighter
+articles of household use, one by one under the shadows of the three
+gilt balls, where Hebrews chained them with chains of interest.
+
+Jimmie came when he was obliged to by circumstances over which he had no
+control. His well-trained legs brought him staggering home and put him
+to bed some nights when he would rather have gone elsewhere.
+
+Swaggering Pete loomed like a golden sun to Maggie. He took her to a
+dime museum where rows of meek freaks astonished her. She contemplated
+their deformities with awe and thought them a sort of chosen tribe.
+
+Pete, raking his brains for amusement, discovered the Central Park
+Menagerie and the Museum of Arts. Sunday afternoons would sometimes find
+them at these places. Pete did not appear to be particularly interested
+in what he saw. He stood around looking heavy, while Maggie giggled in
+glee.
+
+Once at the Menagerie he went into a trance of admiration before the
+spectacle of a very small monkey threatening to thrash a cageful because
+one of them had pulled his tail and he had not wheeled about quickly
+enough to discover who did it. Ever after Pete knew that monkey by sight
+and winked at him, trying to induce hime to fight with other and larger
+monkeys. At the Museum, Maggie said, "Dis is outa sight."
+
+"Oh hell," said Pete, "wait 'till next summer an' I'll take yehs to a
+picnic."
+
+While the girl wandered in the vaulted rooms, Pete occupied himself in
+returning stony stare for stony stare, the appalling scrutiny of the
+watch-dogs of the treasures. Occasionally he would remark in loud tones:
+"Dat jay has got glass eyes," and sentences of the sort. When he tired
+of this amusement he would go to the mummies and moralize over them.
+
+Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had to go
+through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.
+
+"What deh hell," he demanded once.  "Look at all dese little jugs!
+Hundred jugs in a row!  Ten rows in a case an' 'bout a t'ousand cases!
+What deh blazes use is dem?"
+
+Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the
+brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her
+guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the
+beautiful sentiments.  The latter spent most of his time out at soak in
+pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing
+aged strangers from villains.
+
+Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow
+storms beneath happy-hued church windows.  And a choir within singing
+"Joy to the World."  To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was
+transcendental realism.  Joy always within, and they, like the actor,
+inevitably without.  Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic
+pity of their imagined or real condition.
+
+The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate
+of the play was very accurately drawn.  She echoed the maledictions
+that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his
+lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness.
+
+Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of
+the drama.  With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue.
+Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for
+virtue.
+
+The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the
+oppressed.  They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered
+the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers.  When
+anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned.  They
+sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.
+
+In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth
+and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that
+he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his
+generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his
+opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks.  Those actors
+who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by
+the gallery.  If one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile
+distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware
+if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly.
+
+The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the
+representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his
+pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes,
+imperturbable amid suffering.
+
+Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of
+the melodrama.  She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous
+eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked.  The theatre made her
+think.  She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen
+imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be
+acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt
+factory.
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+A group of urchins were intent upon the side door of a saloon.
+Expectancy gleamed from their eyes.  They were twisting their fingers
+in excitement.
+
+"Here she comes," yelled one of them suddenly.
+
+The group of urchins burst instantly asunder and its individual
+fragments were spread in a wide, respectable half circle about the
+point of interest.  The saloon door opened with a crash, and the figure
+of a woman appeared upon the threshold.  Her grey hair fell in knotted
+masses about her shoulders.  Her face was crimsoned and wet with
+perspiration.  Her eyes had a rolling glare.
+
+"Not a damn cent more of me money will yehs ever get, not a damn cent.
+I spent me money here fer t'ree years an' now yehs tells me yeh'll sell
+me no more stuff!  T'hell wid yeh, Johnnie Murckre!  'Disturbance'?
+Disturbance be damned!  T'hell wid yeh, Johnnie--"
+
+The door received a kick of exasperation from within and the woman
+lurched heavily out on the sidewalk.
+
+The gamins in the half-circle became violently agitated.  They began to
+dance about and hoot and yell and jeer.  Wide dirty grins spread over
+each face.
+
+The woman made a furious dash at a particularly outrageous cluster of
+little boys.  They laughed delightedly and scampered off a short
+distance, calling out over their shoulders to her.  She stood tottering
+on the curb-stone and thundered at them.
+
+"Yeh devil's kids," she howled, shaking red fists.  The little boys
+whooped in glee.  As she started up the street they fell in behind and
+marched uproariously.  Occasionally she wheeled about and made charges
+on them.  They ran nimbly out of reach and taunted her.
+
+In the frame of a gruesome doorway she stood for a moment cursing them.
+Her hair straggled, giving her crimson features a look of insanity.
+Her great fists quivered as she shook them madly in the air.
+
+The urchins made terrific noises until she turned and disappeared.
+Then they filed quietly in the way they had come.
+
+The woman floundered about in the lower hall of the tenement house and
+finally stumbled up the stairs.  On an upper hall a door was opened and
+a collection of heads peered curiously out, watching her.  With a
+wrathful snort the woman confronted the door, but it was slammed
+hastily in her face and the key was turned.
+
+She stood for a few minutes, delivering a frenzied challenge at the
+panels.
+
+"Come out in deh hall, Mary Murphy, damn yeh, if yehs want a row.  Come
+ahn, yeh overgrown terrier, come ahn."
+
+She began to kick the door with her great feet.  She shrilly defied the
+universe to appear and do battle.  Her cursing trebles brought heads
+from all doors save the one she threatened.  Her eyes glared in every
+direction.  The air was full of her tossing fists.
+
+"Come ahn, deh hull damn gang of yehs, come ahn," she roared at the
+spectators.  An oath or two, cat-calls, jeers and bits of facetious
+advice were given in reply.  Missiles clattered about her feet.
+
+"What deh hell's deh matter wid yeh?" said a voice in the gathered
+gloom, and Jimmie came forward.  He carried a tin dinner-pail in his
+hand and under his arm a brown truckman's apron done in a bundle.
+"What deh hell's wrong?" he demanded.
+
+"Come out, all of yehs, come out," his mother was howling.  "Come ahn
+an' I'll stamp her damn brains under me feet."
+
+"Shet yer face, an' come home, yeh damned old fool," roared Jimmie at
+her.  She strided up to him and twirled her fingers in his face.  Her
+eyes were darting flames of unreasoning rage and her frame trembled
+with eagerness for a fight.
+
+"T'hell wid yehs!  An' who deh hell are yehs?  I ain't givin' a snap of
+me fingers fer yehs," she bawled at him.  She turned her huge back in
+tremendous disdain and climbed the stairs to the next floor.
+
+Jimmie followed, cursing blackly.  At the top of the flight he seized
+his mother's arm and started to drag her toward the door of their room.
+
+"Come home, damn yeh," he gritted between his teeth.
+
+"Take yer hands off me!  Take yer hands off me," shrieked his mother.
+
+She raised her arm and whirled her great fist at her son's face.
+Jimmie dodged his head and the blow struck him in the back of the neck.
+"Damn yeh," gritted he again.  He threw out his left hand and writhed
+his fingers about her middle arm.  The mother and the son began to sway
+and struggle like gladiators.
+
+"Whoop!" said the Rum Alley tenement house.  The hall filled with
+interested spectators.
+
+"Hi, ol' lady, dat was a dandy!"
+
+"T'ree to one on deh red!"
+
+"Ah, stop yer damn scrappin'!"
+
+The door of the Johnson home opened and Maggie looked out.  Jimmie made
+a supreme cursing effort and hurled his mother into the room.  He
+quickly followed and closed the door.  The Rum Alley tenement swore
+disappointedly and retired.
+
+The mother slowly gathered herself up from the floor.  Her eyes
+glittered menacingly upon her children.
+
+"Here, now," said Jimmie, "we've had enough of dis.  Sit down, an' don'
+make no trouble."
+
+He grasped her arm, and twisting it, forced her into a creaking chair.
+
+"Keep yer hands off me," roared his mother again.
+
+"Damn yer ol' hide," yelled Jimmie, madly.  Maggie shrieked and ran
+into the other room.  To her there came the sound of a storm of crashes
+and curses.  There was a great final thump and Jimmie's voice cried:
+"Dere, damn yeh, stay still."  Maggie opened the door now, and went
+warily out.  "Oh, Jimmie."
+
+He was leaning against the wall and swearing.  Blood stood upon bruises
+on his knotty fore-arms where they had scraped against the floor or the
+walls in the scuffle.  The mother lay screeching on the floor, the
+tears running down her furrowed face.
+
+Maggie, standing in the middle of the room, gazed about her.  The usual
+upheaval of the tables and chairs had taken place.  Crockery was strewn
+broadcast in fragments.  The stove had been disturbed on its legs, and
+now leaned idiotically to one side.  A pail had been upset and water
+spread in all directions.
+
+The door opened and Pete appeared.  He shrugged his shoulders.  "Oh,
+Gawd," he observed.
+
+He walked over to Maggie and whispered in her ear.  "Ah, what deh hell,
+Mag?  Come ahn and we'll have a hell of a time."
+
+The mother in the corner upreared her head and shook her tangled locks.
+
+"Teh hell wid him and you," she said, glowering at her daughter in the
+gloom.  Her eyes seemed to burn balefully.  "Yeh've gone teh deh devil,
+Mag Johnson, yehs knows yehs have gone teh deh devil.  Yer a disgrace
+teh yer people, damn yeh.  An' now, git out an' go ahn wid dat
+doe-faced jude of yours.  Go teh hell wid him, damn yeh, an' a good
+riddance.  Go teh hell an' see how yeh likes it."
+
+Maggie gazed long at her mother.
+
+"Go teh hell now, an' see how yeh likes it.  Git out.  I won't have
+sech as yehs in me house!  Get out, d'yeh hear!  Damn yeh, git out!"
+
+The girl began to tremble.
+
+At this instant Pete came forward.  "Oh, what deh hell, Mag, see,"
+whispered he softly in her ear.  "Dis all blows over.  See?  Deh ol'
+woman 'ill be all right in deh mornin'.  Come ahn out wid me!  We'll
+have a hell of a time."
+
+The woman on the floor cursed.  Jimmie was intent upon his bruised
+fore-arms.  The girl cast a glance about the room filled with a chaotic
+mass of debris, and at the red, writhing body of her mother.
+
+"Go teh hell an' good riddance."
+
+She went.
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+Jimmie had an idea it wasn't common courtesy for a friend to come to
+one's home and ruin one's sister.  But he was not sure how much Pete
+knew about the rules of politeness.
+
+The following night he returned home from work at rather a late hour in
+the evening.  In passing through the halls he came upon the gnarled and
+leathery old woman who possessed the music box.  She was grinning in
+the dim light that drifted through dust-stained panes.  She beckoned to
+him with a smudged forefinger.
+
+"Ah, Jimmie, what do yehs t'ink I got onto las' night.  It was deh
+funnies' t'ing I ever saw," she cried, coming close to him and leering.
+She was trembling with eagerness to tell her tale.  "I was by me door
+las' night when yer sister and her jude feller came in late, oh, very
+late.  An' she, the dear, she was a-cryin' as if her heart would break,
+she was.  It was deh funnies' t'ing I ever saw.  An' right out here by
+me door she asked him did he love her, did he.  An' she was a-cryin' as
+if her heart would break, poor t'ing.  An' him, I could see by deh way
+what he said it dat she had been askin' orften, he says: 'Oh, hell,
+yes,' he says, says he, 'Oh, hell, yes.'"
+
+Storm-clouds swept over Jimmie's face, but he turned from the leathery
+old woman and plodded on up-stairs.
+
+"Oh, hell, yes," called she after him.  She laughed a laugh that was
+like a prophetic croak.  "'Oh, hell, yes,' he says, says he, 'Oh, hell,
+yes.'"
+
+There was no one in at home.  The rooms showed that attempts had been
+made at tidying them.  Parts of the wreckage of the day before had been
+repaired by an unskilful hand.  A chair or two and the table, stood
+uncertainly upon legs.  The floor had been newly swept.  Too, the blue
+ribbons had been restored to the curtains, and the lambrequin, with its
+immense sheaves of yellow wheat and red roses of equal size, had been
+returned, in a worn and sorry state, to its position at the mantel.
+Maggie's jacket and hat were gone from the nail behind the door.
+
+Jimmie walked to the window and began to look through the blurred
+glass.  It occurred to him to vaguely wonder, for an instant, if some
+of the women of his acquaintance had brothers.
+
+Suddenly, however, he began to swear.
+
+"But he was me frien'!  I brought 'im here!  Dat's deh hell of it!"
+
+He fumed about the room, his anger gradually rising to the furious
+pitch.
+
+"I'll kill deh jay!  Dat's what I'll do!  I'll kill deh jay!"
+
+He clutched his hat and sprang toward the door.  But it opened and his
+mother's great form blocked the passage.
+
+"What deh hell's deh matter wid yeh?" exclaimed she, coming into the
+rooms.
+
+Jimmie gave vent to a sardonic curse and then laughed heavily.
+
+"Well, Maggie's gone teh deh devil!  Dat's what!  See?"
+
+"Eh?" said his mother.
+
+"Maggie's gone teh deh devil!  Are yehs deaf?" roared Jimmie,
+impatiently.
+
+"Deh hell she has," murmured the mother, astounded.
+
+Jimmie grunted, and then began to stare out at the window.  His mother
+sat down in a chair, but a moment later sprang erect and delivered a
+maddened whirl of oaths.  Her son turned to look at her as she reeled
+and swayed in the middle of the room, her fierce face convulsed with
+passion, her blotched arms raised high in imprecation.
+
+"May Gawd curse her forever," she shrieked.  "May she eat nothin' but
+stones and deh dirt in deh street.  May she sleep in deh gutter an'
+never see deh sun shine agin.  Deh damn--"
+
+"Here, now," said her son.  "Take a drop on yourself."
+
+The mother raised lamenting eyes to the ceiling.
+
+"She's deh devil's own chil', Jimmie," she whispered.  "Ah, who would
+t'ink such a bad girl could grow up in our fambly, Jimmie, me son.
+Many deh hour I've spent in talk wid dat girl an' tol' her if she ever
+went on deh streets I'd see her damned.  An' after all her bringin' up
+an' what I tol' her and talked wid her, she goes teh deh bad, like a
+duck teh water."
+
+The tears rolled down her furrowed face.  Her hands trembled.
+
+"An' den when dat Sadie MacMallister next door to us was sent teh deh
+devil by dat feller what worked in deh soap-factory, didn't I tell our
+Mag dat if she--"
+
+"Ah, dat's annuder story," interrupted the brother.  "Of course, dat
+Sadie was nice an' all dat--but--see--it ain't dessame as if--well,
+Maggie was diff'ent--see--she was diff'ent."
+
+He was trying to formulate a theory that he had always unconsciously
+held, that all sisters, excepting his own, could advisedly be ruined.
+
+He suddenly broke out again.  "I'll go t'ump hell outa deh mug what did
+her deh harm.  I'll kill 'im!  He t'inks he kin scrap, but when he gits
+me a-chasin' 'im he'll fin' out where he's wrong, deh damned duffer.
+I'll wipe up deh street wid 'im."
+
+In a fury he plunged out of the doorway.  As he vanished the mother
+raised her head and lifted both hands, entreating.
+
+"May Gawd curse her forever," she cried.
+
+In the darkness of the hallway Jimmie discerned a knot of women talking
+volubly.  When he strode by they paid no attention to him.
+
+"She allus was a bold thing," he heard one of them cry in an eager
+voice.  "Dere wasn't a feller come teh deh house but she'd try teh mash
+'im.  My Annie says deh shameless t'ing tried teh ketch her feller, her
+own feller, what we useter know his fader."
+
+"I could a' tol' yehs dis two years ago," said a woman, in a key of
+triumph.  "Yessir, it was over two years ago dat I says teh my ol' man,
+I says, 'Dat Johnson girl ain't straight,' I says.  'Oh, hell,' he
+says.  'Oh, hell.'  'Dat's all right,' I says, 'but I know what I
+knows,' I says, 'an' it 'ill come out later.  You wait an' see,' I
+says, 'you see.'"
+
+"Anybody what had eyes could see dat dere was somethin' wrong wid dat
+girl.  I didn't like her actions."
+
+On the street Jimmie met a friend.  "What deh hell?" asked the latter.
+
+Jimmie explained.  "An' I'll t'ump 'im till he can't stand."
+
+"Oh, what deh hell," said the friend.  "What's deh use!  Yeh'll git
+pulled in!  Everybody 'ill be onto it!  An' ten plunks!  Gee!"
+
+Jimmie was determined.  "He t'inks he kin scrap, but he'll fin' out
+diff'ent."
+
+"Gee," remonstrated the friend.  "What deh hell?"
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+On a corner a glass-fronted building shed a yellow glare upon the
+pavements.  The open mouth of a saloon called seductively to passengers
+to enter and annihilate sorrow or create rage.
+
+The interior of the place was papered in olive and bronze tints of
+imitation leather.  A shining bar of counterfeit massiveness extended
+down the side of the room.  Behind it a great mahogany-appearing
+sideboard reached the ceiling.  Upon its shelves rested pyramids of
+shimmering glasses that were never disturbed.  Mirrors set in the face
+of the sideboard multiplied them.  Lemons, oranges and paper napkins,
+arranged with mathematical precision, sat among the glasses.  Many-hued
+decanters of liquor perched at regular intervals on the lower shelves.
+A nickel-plated cash register occupied a position in the exact centre
+of the general effect.  The elementary senses of it all seemed to be
+opulence and geometrical accuracy.
+
+Across from the bar a smaller counter held a collection of plates upon
+which swarmed frayed fragments of crackers, slices of boiled ham,
+dishevelled bits of cheese, and pickles swimming in vinegar.  An odor
+of grasping, begrimed hands and munching mouths pervaded.
+
+Pete, in a white jacket, was behind the bar bending expectantly toward
+a quiet stranger.  "A beeh," said the man.  Pete drew a foam-topped
+glassful and set it dripping upon the bar.
+
+At this moment the light bamboo doors at the entrance swung open and
+crashed against the siding.  Jimmie and a companion entered.  They
+swaggered unsteadily but belligerently toward the bar and looked at
+Pete with bleared and blinking eyes.
+
+"Gin," said Jimmie.
+
+"Gin," said the companion.
+
+Pete slid a bottle and two glasses along the bar.  He bended his head
+sideways as he assiduously polished away with a napkin at the gleaming
+wood.  He had a look of watchfulness upon his features.
+
+Jimmie and his companion kept their eyes upon the bartender and
+conversed loudly in tones of contempt.
+
+"He's a dindy masher, ain't he, by Gawd?" laughed Jimmie.
+
+"Oh, hell, yes," said the companion, sneering widely.  "He's great, he
+is.  Git onto deh mug on deh blokie.  Dat's enough to make a feller
+turn hand-springs in 'is sleep."
+
+The quiet stranger moved himself and his glass a trifle further away
+and maintained an attitude of oblivion.
+
+"Gee! ain't he hot stuff!"
+
+"Git onto his shape!  Great Gawd!"
+
+"Hey," cried Jimmie, in tones of command.  Pete came along slowly, with
+a sullen dropping of the under lip.
+
+"Well," he growled, "what's eatin' yehs?"
+
+"Gin," said Jimmie.
+
+"Gin," said the companion.
+
+As Pete confronted them with the bottle and the glasses, they laughed
+in his face.  Jimmie's companion, evidently overcome with merriment,
+pointed a grimy forefinger in Pete's direction.
+
+"Say, Jimmie," demanded he, "what deh hell is dat behind deh bar?"
+
+"Damned if I knows," replied Jimmie.  They laughed loudly.  Pete put
+down a bottle with a bang and turned a formidable face toward them.  He
+disclosed his teeth and his shoulders heaved restlessly.
+
+"You fellers can't guy me," he said.  "Drink yer stuff an' git out an'
+don' make no trouble."
+
+Instantly the laughter faded from the faces of the two men and
+expressions of offended dignity immediately came.
+
+"Who deh hell has said anyt'ing teh you," cried they in the same breath.
+
+The quiet stranger looked at the door calculatingly.
+
+"Ah, come off," said Pete to the two men.  "Don't pick me up for no
+jay.  Drink yer rum an' git out an' don' make no trouble."
+
+"Oh, deh hell," airily cried Jimmie.
+
+"Oh, deh hell," airily repeated his companion.
+
+"We goes when we git ready!  See!" continued Jimmie.
+
+"Well," said Pete in a threatening voice, "don' make no trouble."
+
+Jimmie suddenly leaned forward with his head on one side.  He snarled
+like a wild animal.
+
+"Well, what if we does?  See?" said he.
+
+Dark blood flushed into Pete's face, and he shot a lurid glance at
+Jimmie.
+
+"Well, den we'll see whose deh bes' man, you or me," he said.
+
+The quiet stranger moved modestly toward the door.
+
+Jimmie began to swell with valor.
+
+"Don' pick me up fer no tenderfoot.  When yeh tackles me yeh tackles
+one of deh bes' men in deh city.  See?  I'm a scrapper, I am.  Ain't
+dat right, Billie?"
+
+"Sure, Mike," responded his companion in tones of conviction.
+
+"Oh, hell," said Pete, easily.  "Go fall on yerself."
+
+The two men again began to laugh.
+
+"What deh hell is dat talkin'?" cried the companion.
+
+"Damned if I knows," replied Jimmie with exaggerated contempt.
+
+Pete made a furious gesture.  "Git outa here now, an' don' make no
+trouble.  See?  Youse fellers er lookin' fer a scrap an' it's damn
+likely yeh'll fin' one if yeh keeps on shootin' off yer mout's.  I know
+yehs!  See?  I kin lick better men dan yehs ever saw in yer lifes.
+Dat's right!  See?  Don' pick me up fer no stuff er yeh might be jolted
+out in deh street before yeh knows where yeh is.  When I comes from
+behind dis bar, I t'rows yehs bote inteh deh street.  See?"
+
+"Oh, hell," cried the two men in chorus.
+
+The glare of a panther came into Pete's eyes.  "Dat's what I said!
+Unnerstan'?"
+
+He came through a passage at the end of the bar and swelled down upon
+the two men.  They stepped promptly forward and crowded close to him.
+
+They bristled like three roosters.  They moved their heads pugnaciously
+and kept their shoulders braced.  The nervous muscles about each mouth
+twitched with a forced smile of mockery.
+
+"Well, what deh hell yer goin' teh do?" gritted Jimmie.
+
+Pete stepped warily back, waving his hands before him to keep the men
+from coming too near.
+
+"Well, what deh hell yer goin' teh do?" repeated Jimmie's ally.  They
+kept close to him, taunting and leering.  They strove to make him
+attempt the initial blow.
+
+"Keep back, now!  Don' crowd me," ominously said Pete.
+
+Again they chorused in contempt.  "Oh, hell!"
+
+In a small, tossing group, the three men edged for positions like
+frigates contemplating battle.
+
+"Well, why deh hell don' yeh try teh t'row us out?" cried Jimmie and
+his ally with copious sneers.
+
+The bravery of bull-dogs sat upon the faces of the men.  Their clenched
+fists moved like eager weapons.
+
+The allied two jostled the bartender's elbows, glaring at him with
+feverish eyes and forcing him toward the wall.
+
+Suddenly Pete swore redly.  The flash of action gleamed from his eyes.
+He threw back his arm and aimed a tremendous, lightning-like blow at
+Jimmie's face.  His foot swung a step forward and the weight of his
+body was behind his fist.  Jimmie ducked his head, Bowery-like, with
+the quickness of a cat.  The fierce, answering blows of him and his
+ally crushed on Pete's bowed head.
+
+The quiet stranger vanished.
+
+The arms of the combatants whirled in the air like flails.  The faces
+of the men, at first flushed to flame-colored anger, now began to fade
+to the pallor of warriors in the blood and heat of a battle.  Their
+lips curled back and stretched tightly over the gums in ghoul-like
+grins.  Through their white, gripped teeth struggled hoarse whisperings
+of oaths.  Their eyes glittered with murderous fire.
+
+Each head was huddled between its owner's shoulders, and arms were
+swinging with marvelous rapidity.  Feet scraped to and fro with a loud
+scratching sound upon the sanded floor.  Blows left crimson blotches
+upon pale skin.  The curses of the first quarter minute of the fight
+died away.  The breaths of the fighters came wheezingly from their lips
+and the three chests were straining and heaving.  Pete at intervals
+gave vent to low, labored hisses, that sounded like a desire to kill.
+Jimmie's ally gibbered at times like a wounded maniac.  Jimmie was
+silent, fighting with the face of a sacrificial priest.  The rage of
+fear shone in all their eyes and their blood-colored fists swirled.
+
+At a tottering moment a blow from Pete's hand struck the ally and he
+crashed to the floor.  He wriggled instantly to his feet and grasping
+the quiet stranger's beer glass from the bar, hurled it at Pete's head.
+
+High on the wall it burst like a bomb, shivering fragments flying in
+all directions.  Then missiles came to every man's hand.  The place had
+heretofore appeared free of things to throw, but suddenly glass and
+bottles went singing through the air.  They were thrown point blank at
+bobbing heads.  The pyramid of shimmering glasses, that had never been
+disturbed, changed to cascades as heavy bottles were flung into them.
+Mirrors splintered to nothing.
+
+The three frothing creatures on the floor buried themselves in a frenzy
+for blood.  There followed in the wake of missiles and fists some
+unknown prayers, perhaps for death.
+
+The quiet stranger had sprawled very pyrotechnically out on the
+sidewalk.  A laugh ran up and down the avenue for the half of a block.
+
+"Dey've trowed a bloke inteh deh street."
+
+People heard the sound of breaking glass and shuffling feet within the
+saloon and came running.  A small group, bending down to look under the
+bamboo doors, watching the fall of glass, and three pairs of violent
+legs, changed in a moment to a crowd.
+
+A policeman came charging down the sidewalk and bounced through the
+doors into the saloon.  The crowd bended and surged in absorbing
+anxiety to see.
+
+Jimmie caught first sight of the on-coming interruption.  On his feet
+he had the same regard for a policeman that, when on his truck, he had
+for a fire engine.  He howled and ran for the side door.
+
+The officer made a terrific advance, club in hand.  One comprehensive
+sweep of the long night stick threw the ally to the floor and forced
+Pete to a corner.  With his disengaged hand he made a furious effort at
+Jimmie's coat-tails.  Then he regained his balance and paused.
+
+"Well, well, you are a pair of pictures.  What in hell yeh been up to?"
+
+Jimmie, with his face drenched in blood, escaped up a side street,
+pursued a short distance by some of the more law-loving, or excited
+individuals of the crowd.
+
+Later, from a corner safely dark, he saw the policeman, the ally and
+the bartender emerge from the saloon.  Pete locked the doors and then
+followed up the avenue in the rear of the crowd-encompassed policeman
+and his charge.
+
+On first thoughts Jimmie, with his heart throbbing at battle heat,
+started to go desperately to the rescue of his friend, but he halted.
+
+"Ah, what deh hell?" he demanded of himself.
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+In a hall of irregular shape sat Pete and Maggie drinking beer.  A
+submissive orchestra dictated to by a spectacled man with frowsy hair
+and a dress suit, industriously followed the bobs of his head and the
+waves of his baton.  A ballad singer, in a dress of flaming scarlet,
+sang in the inevitable voice of brass.  When she vanished, men seated
+at the tables near the front applauded loudly, pounding the polished
+wood with their beer glasses.  She returned attired in less gown, and
+sang again.  She received another enthusiastic encore.  She reappeared
+in still less gown and danced.  The deafening rumble of glasses and
+clapping of hands that followed her exit indicated an overwhelming
+desire to have her come on for the fourth time, but the curiosity of
+the audience was not gratified.
+
+Maggie was pale.  From her eyes had been plucked all look of
+self-reliance.  She leaned with a dependent air toward her companion.
+She was timid, as if fearing his anger or displeasure.  She seemed to
+beseech tenderness of him.
+
+Pete's air of distinguished valor had grown upon him until it
+threatened stupendous dimensions.  He was infinitely gracious to the
+girl.  It was apparent to her that his condescension was a marvel.
+
+He could appear to strut even while sitting still and he showed that he
+was a lion of lordly characteristics by the air with which he spat.
+
+With Maggie gazing at him wonderingly, he took pride in commanding the
+waiters who were, however, indifferent or deaf.
+
+"Hi, you, git a russle on yehs!  What deh hell yehs lookin' at?  Two
+more beehs, d'yeh hear?"
+
+He leaned back and critically regarded the person of a girl with a
+straw-colored wig who upon the stage was flinging her heels in somewhat
+awkward imitation of a well-known danseuse.
+
+At times Maggie told Pete long confidential tales of her former home
+life, dwelling upon the escapades of the other members of the family
+and the difficulties she had to combat in order to obtain a degree of
+comfort.  He responded in tones of philanthropy.  He pressed her arm
+with an air of reassuring proprietorship.
+
+"Dey was damn jays," he said, denouncing the mother and brother.
+
+The sound of the music which, by the efforts of the frowsy-headed
+leader, drifted to her ears through the smoke-filled atmosphere, made
+the girl dream.  She thought of her former Rum Alley environment and
+turned to regard Pete's strong protecting fists.  She thought of the
+collar and cuff manufactory and the eternal moan of the proprietor:
+"What een hell do you sink I pie fife dolla a week for?  Play?  No, py
+damn."  She contemplated Pete's man-subduing eyes and noted that wealth
+and prosperity was indicated by his clothes.  She imagined a future,
+rose-tinted, because of its distance from all that she previously had
+experienced.
+
+As to the present she perceived only vague reasons to be miserable.
+Her life was Pete's and she considered him worthy of the charge.  She
+would be disturbed by no particular apprehensions, so long as Pete
+adored her as he now said he did.  She did not feel like a bad woman.
+To her knowledge she had never seen any better.
+
+At times men at other tables regarded the girl furtively.  Pete, aware
+of it, nodded at her and grinned.  He felt proud.
+
+"Mag, yer a bloomin' good-looker," he remarked, studying her face
+through the haze.  The men made Maggie fear, but she blushed at Pete's
+words as it became apparent to her that she was the apple of his eye.
+
+Grey-headed men, wonderfully pathetic in their dissipation, stared at
+her through clouds.  Smooth-cheeked boys, some of them with faces of
+stone and mouths of sin, not nearly so pathetic as the grey heads,
+tried to find the girl's eyes in the smoke wreaths.  Maggie considered
+she was not what they thought her.  She confined her glances to Pete
+and the stage.
+
+The orchestra played negro melodies and a versatile drummer pounded,
+whacked, clattered and scratched on a dozen machines to make noise.
+
+Those glances of the men, shot at Maggie from under half-closed lids,
+made her tremble.  She thought them all to be worse men than Pete.
+
+"Come, let's go," she said.
+
+As they went out Maggie perceived two women seated at a table with some
+men.  They were painted and their cheeks had lost their roundness.  As
+she passed them the girl, with a shrinking movement, drew back her
+skirts.
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+Jimmie did not return home for a number of days after the fight with
+Pete in the saloon.  When he did, he approached with extreme caution.
+
+He found his mother raving.  Maggie had not returned home.  The parent
+continually wondered how her daughter could come to such a pass.  She
+had never considered Maggie as a pearl dropped unstained into Rum Alley
+from Heaven, but she could not conceive how it was possible for her
+daughter to fall so low as to bring disgrace upon her family.  She was
+terrific in denunciation of the girl's wickedness.
+
+The fact that the neighbors talked of it, maddened her.  When women
+came in, and in the course of their conversation casually asked,
+"Where's Maggie dese days?" the mother shook her fuzzy head at them and
+appalled them with curses.  Cunning hints inviting confidence she
+rebuffed with violence.
+
+"An' wid all deh bringin' up she had, how could she?" moaningly she
+asked of her son.  "Wid all deh talkin' wid her I did an' deh t'ings I
+tol' her to remember?  When a girl is bringed up deh way I bringed up
+Maggie, how kin she go teh deh devil?"
+
+Jimmie was transfixed by these questions.  He could not conceive how
+under the circumstances his mother's daughter and his sister could have
+been so wicked.
+
+His mother took a drink from a squdgy bottle that sat on the table.
+She continued her lament.
+
+"She had a bad heart, dat girl did, Jimmie.  She was wicked teh deh
+heart an' we never knowed it."
+
+Jimmie nodded, admitting the fact.
+
+"We lived in deh same house wid her an' I brought her up an' we never
+knowed how bad she was."
+
+Jimmie nodded again.
+
+"Wid a home like dis an' a mudder like me, she went teh deh bad," cried
+the mother, raising her eyes.
+
+One day, Jimmie came home, sat down in a chair and began to wriggle
+about with a new and strange nervousness.  At last he spoke
+shamefacedly.
+
+"Well, look-a-here, dis t'ing queers us!  See?  We're queered!  An'
+maybe it 'ud be better if I--well, I t'ink I kin look 'er up an'--maybe
+it 'ud be better if I fetched her home an'--"
+
+The mother started from her chair and broke forth into a storm of
+passionate anger.
+
+"What!  Let 'er come an' sleep under deh same roof wid her mudder agin!
+Oh, yes, I will, won't I?  Sure?  Shame on yehs, Jimmie Johnson, for
+sayin' such a t'ing teh yer own mudder--teh yer own mudder!  Little did
+I t'ink when yehs was a babby playin' about me feet dat ye'd grow up
+teh say sech a t'ing teh yer mudder--yer own mudder.  I never taut--"
+
+Sobs choked her and interrupted her reproaches.
+
+"Dere ain't nottin' teh raise sech hell about," said Jimmie.  "I on'y
+says it 'ud be better if we keep dis t'ing dark, see?  It queers us!
+See?"
+
+His mother laughed a laugh that seemed to ring through the city and be
+echoed and re-echoed by countless other laughs.  "Oh, yes, I will,
+won't I!  Sure!"
+
+"Well, yeh must take me fer a damn fool," said Jimmie, indignant at his
+mother for mocking him.  "I didn't say we'd make 'er inteh a little tin
+angel, ner nottin', but deh way it is now she can queer us!  Don' che
+see?"
+
+"Aye, she'll git tired of deh life atter a while an' den she'll wanna
+be a-comin' home, won' she, deh beast!  I'll let 'er in den, won' I?"
+
+"Well, I didn' mean none of dis prod'gal bus'ness anyway," explained
+Jimmie.
+
+"It wasn't no prod'gal dauter, yeh damn fool," said the mother.  "It
+was prod'gal son, anyhow."
+
+"I know dat," said Jimmie.
+
+For a time they sat in silence.  The mother's eyes gloated on a scene
+her imagination could call before her.  Her lips were set in a
+vindictive smile.
+
+"Aye, she'll cry, won' she, an' carry on, an' tell how Pete, or some
+odder feller, beats 'er an' she'll say she's sorry an' all dat an' she
+ain't happy, she ain't, an' she wants to come home agin, she does."
+
+With grim humor, the mother imitated the possible wailing notes of the
+daughter's voice.
+
+"Den I'll take 'er in, won't I, deh beast.  She kin cry 'er two eyes
+out on deh stones of deh street before I'll dirty deh place wid her.
+She abused an' ill-treated her own mudder--her own mudder what loved
+her an' she'll never git anodder chance dis side of hell."
+
+Jimmie thought he had a great idea of women's frailty, but he could not
+understand why any of his kin should be victims.
+
+"Damn her," he fervidly said.
+
+Again he wondered vaguely if some of the women of his acquaintance had
+brothers.  Nevertheless, his mind did not for an instant confuse
+himself with those brothers nor his sister with theirs.  After the
+mother had, with great difficulty, suppressed the neighbors, she went
+among them and proclaimed her grief.  "May Gawd forgive dat girl," was
+her continual cry.  To attentive ears she recited the whole length and
+breadth of her woes.
+
+"I bringed 'er up deh way a dauter oughta be bringed up an' dis is how
+she served me!  She went teh deh devil deh first chance she got!  May
+Gawd forgive her."
+
+When arrested for drunkenness she used the story of her daughter's
+downfall with telling effect upon the police justices.  Finally one of
+them said to her, peering down over his spectacles: "Mary, the records
+of this and other courts show that you are the mother of forty-two
+daughters who have been ruined.  The case is unparalleled in the annals
+of this court, and this court thinks--"
+
+The mother went through life shedding large tears of sorrow.  Her red
+face was a picture of agony.
+
+Of course Jimmie publicly damned his sister that he might appear on a
+higher social plane.  But, arguing with himself, stumbling about in
+ways that he knew not, he, once, almost came to a conclusion that his
+sister would have been more firmly good had she better known why.
+However, he felt that he could not hold such a view.  He threw it
+hastily aside.
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+In a hilarious hall there were twenty-eight tables and twenty-eight
+women and a crowd of smoking men.  Valiant noise was made on a stage at
+the end of the hall by an orchestra composed of men who looked as if
+they had just happened in.  Soiled waiters ran to and fro, swooping
+down like hawks on the unwary in the throng; clattering along the
+aisles with trays covered with glasses; stumbling over women's skirts
+and charging two prices for everything but beer, all with a swiftness
+that blurred the view of the cocoanut palms and dusty monstrosities
+painted upon the walls of the room.  A bouncer, with an immense load of
+business upon his hands, plunged about in the crowd, dragging bashful
+strangers to prominent chairs, ordering waiters here and there and
+quarreling furiously with men who wanted to sing with the orchestra.
+
+The usual smoke cloud was present, but so dense that heads and arms
+seemed entangled in it.  The rumble of conversation was replaced by a
+roar.  Plenteous oaths heaved through the air.  The room rang with the
+shrill voices of women bubbling o'er with drink-laughter.  The chief
+element in the music of the orchestra was speed.  The musicians played
+in intent fury.  A woman was singing and smiling upon the stage, but no
+one took notice of her.  The rate at which the piano, cornet and
+violins were going, seemed to impart wildness to the half-drunken
+crowd.  Beer glasses were emptied at a gulp and conversation became a
+rapid chatter.  The smoke eddied and swirled like a shadowy river
+hurrying toward some unseen falls.  Pete and Maggie entered the hall
+and took chairs at a table near the door.  The woman who was seated
+there made an attempt to occupy Pete's attention and, failing, went
+away.
+
+Three weeks had passed since the girl had left home.  The air of
+spaniel-like dependence had been magnified and showed its direct effect
+in the peculiar off-handedness and ease of Pete's ways toward her.
+
+She followed Pete's eyes with hers, anticipating with smiles gracious
+looks from him.
+
+A woman of brilliance and audacity, accompanied by a mere boy, came
+into the place and took seats near them.
+
+At once Pete sprang to his feet, his face beaming with glad surprise.
+
+"By Gawd, there's Nellie," he cried.
+
+He went over to the table and held out an eager hand to the woman.
+
+"Why, hello, Pete, me boy, how are you," said she, giving him her
+fingers.
+
+Maggie took instant note of the woman.  She perceived that her black
+dress fitted her to perfection.  Her linen collar and cuffs were
+spotless.  Tan gloves were stretched over her well-shaped hands.  A hat
+of a prevailing fashion perched jauntily upon her dark hair.  She wore
+no jewelry and was painted with no apparent paint.  She looked
+clear-eyed through the stares of the men.
+
+"Sit down, and call your lady-friend over," she said cordially to Pete.
+At his beckoning Maggie came and sat between Pete and the mere boy.
+
+"I thought yeh were gone away fer good," began Pete, at once.  "When
+did yeh git back?  How did dat Buff'lo bus'ness turn out?"
+
+The woman shrugged her shoulders.  "Well, he didn't have as many stamps
+as he tried to make out, so I shook him, that's all."
+
+"Well, I'm glad teh see yehs back in deh city," said Pete, with awkward
+gallantry.
+
+He and the woman entered into a long conversation, exchanging
+reminiscences of days together.  Maggie sat still, unable to formulate
+an intelligent sentence upon the conversation and painfully aware of it.
+
+She saw Pete's eyes sparkle as he gazed upon the handsome stranger.  He
+listened smilingly to all she said.  The woman was familiar with all
+his affairs, asked him about mutual friends, and knew the amount of his
+salary.
+
+She paid no attention to Maggie, looking toward her once or twice and
+apparently seeing the wall beyond.
+
+The mere boy was sulky.  In the beginning he had welcomed with
+acclamations the additions.
+
+"Let's all have a drink!  What'll you take, Nell?  And you, Miss
+what's-your-name.  Have a drink, Mr. -----, you, I mean."
+
+He had shown a sprightly desire to do the talking for the company and
+tell all about his family.  In a loud voice he declaimed on various
+topics.  He assumed a patronizing air toward Pete.  As Maggie was
+silent, he paid no attention to her.  He made a great show of lavishing
+wealth upon the woman of brilliance and audacity.
+
+"Do keep still, Freddie!  You gibber like an ape, dear," said the woman
+to him.  She turned away and devoted her attention to Pete.
+
+"We'll have many a good time together again, eh?"
+
+"Sure, Mike," said Pete, enthusiastic at once.
+
+"Say," whispered she, leaning forward, "let's go over to Billie's and
+have a heluva time."
+
+"Well, it's dis way!  See?" said Pete.  "I got dis lady frien' here."
+
+"Oh, t'hell with her," argued the woman.
+
+Pete appeared disturbed.
+
+"All right," said she, nodding her head at him.  "All right for you!
+We'll see the next time you ask me to go anywheres with you."
+
+Pete squirmed.
+
+"Say," he said, beseechingly, "come wid me a minit an' I'll tell yer
+why."
+
+The woman waved her hand.
+
+"Oh, that's all right, you needn't explain, you know.  You wouldn't
+come merely because you wouldn't come, that's all there is of it."
+
+To Pete's visible distress she turned to the mere boy, bringing him
+speedily from a terrific rage.  He had been debating whether it would
+be the part of a man to pick a quarrel with Pete, or would he be
+justified in striking him savagely with his beer glass without warning.
+But he recovered himself when the woman turned to renew her smilings.
+He beamed upon her with an expression that was somewhat tipsy and
+inexpressibly tender.
+
+"Say, shake that Bowery jay," requested he, in a loud whisper.
+
+"Freddie, you are so droll," she replied.
+
+Pete reached forward and touched the woman on the arm.
+
+"Come out a minit while I tells yeh why I can't go wid yer.  Yer doin'
+me dirt, Nell!  I never taut ye'd do me dirt, Nell.  Come on, will
+yer?"  He spoke in tones of injury.
+
+"Why, I don't see why I should be interested in your explanations,"
+said the woman, with a coldness that seemed to reduce Pete to a pulp.
+
+His eyes pleaded with her.  "Come out a minit while I tells yeh."
+
+The woman nodded slightly at Maggie and the mere boy, "'Scuse me."
+
+The mere boy interrupted his loving smile and turned a shrivelling
+glare upon Pete.  His boyish countenance flushed and he spoke, in a
+whine, to the woman:
+
+"Oh, I say, Nellie, this ain't a square deal, you know.  You aren't
+goin' to leave me and go off with that duffer, are you?  I should
+think--"
+
+"Why, you dear boy, of course I'm not," cried the woman,
+affectionately.  She bended over and whispered in his ear.  He smiled
+again and settled in his chair as if resolved to wait patiently.
+
+As the woman walked down between the rows of tables, Pete was at her
+shoulder talking earnestly, apparently in explanation.  The woman waved
+her hands with studied airs of indifference.  The doors swung behind
+them, leaving Maggie and the mere boy seated at the table.
+
+Maggie was dazed.  She could dimly perceive that something stupendous
+had happened.  She wondered why Pete saw fit to remonstrate with the
+woman, pleading for forgiveness with his eyes.  She thought she noted
+an air of submission about her leonine Pete.  She was astounded.
+
+The mere boy occupied himself with cock-tails and a cigar.  He was
+tranquilly silent for half an hour.  Then he bestirred himself and
+spoke.
+
+"Well," he said, sighing, "I knew this was the way it would be." There
+was another stillness.  The mere boy seemed to be musing.
+
+"She was pulling m'leg.  That's the whole amount of it," he said,
+suddenly.  "It's a bloomin' shame the way that girl does.  Why, I've
+spent over two dollars in drinks to-night.  And she goes off with that
+plug-ugly who looks as if he had been hit in the face with a coin-die.
+I call it rocky treatment for a fellah like me.  Here, waiter, bring me
+a cock-tail and make it damned strong."
+
+Maggie made no reply.  She was watching the doors.  "It's a mean piece
+of business," complained the mere boy.  He explained to her how amazing
+it was that anybody should treat him in such a manner.  "But I'll get
+square with her, you bet.  She won't get far ahead of yours truly, you
+know," he added, winking.  "I'll tell her plainly that it was bloomin'
+mean business.  And she won't come it over me with any of her
+'now-Freddie-dears.'  She thinks my name is Freddie, you know, but of
+course it ain't.  I always tell these people some name like that,
+because if they got onto your right name they might use it sometime.
+Understand?  Oh, they don't fool me much."
+
+Maggie was paying no attention, being intent upon the doors.  The mere
+boy relapsed into a period of gloom, during which he exterminated a
+number of cock-tails with a determined air, as if replying defiantly to
+fate.  He occasionally broke forth into sentences composed of
+invectives joined together in a long string.
+
+The girl was still staring at the doors.  After a time the mere boy
+began to see cobwebs just in front of his nose.  He spurred himself
+into being agreeable and insisted upon her having a charlotte-russe and
+a glass of beer.
+
+"They's gone," he remarked, "they's gone."  He looked at her through
+the smoke wreaths.  "Shay, lil' girl, we mightish well make bes' of it.
+You ain't such bad-lookin' girl, y'know.  Not half bad.  Can't come up
+to Nell, though.  No, can't do it!  Well, I should shay not!  Nell
+fine-lookin' girl!  F--i--n--ine.  You look damn bad longsider her, but
+by y'self ain't so bad.  Have to do anyhow.  Nell gone.  On'y you left.
+Not half bad, though."
+
+Maggie stood up.
+
+"I'm going home," she said.
+
+The mere boy started.
+
+"Eh?  What?  Home," he cried, struck with amazement.  "I beg pardon,
+did hear say home?"
+
+"I'm going home," she repeated.
+
+"Great Gawd, what hava struck," demanded the mere boy of himself,
+stupefied.
+
+In a semi-comatose state he conducted her on board an up-town car,
+ostentatiously paid her fare, leered kindly at her through the rear
+window and fell off the steps.
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+A forlorn woman went along a lighted avenue.  The street was filled
+with people desperately bound on missions.  An endless crowd darted at
+the elevated station stairs and the horse cars were thronged with
+owners of bundles.
+
+The pace of the forlorn woman was slow.  She was apparently searching
+for some one.  She loitered near the doors of saloons and watched men
+emerge from them.  She scanned furtively the faces in the rushing
+stream of pedestrians.  Hurrying men, bent on catching some boat or
+train, jostled her elbows, failing to notice her, their thoughts fixed
+on distant dinners.
+
+The forlorn woman had a peculiar face.  Her smile was no smile.  But
+when in repose her features had a shadowy look that was like a sardonic
+grin, as if some one had sketched with cruel forefinger indelible lines
+about her mouth.
+
+Jimmie came strolling up the avenue.  The woman encountered him with an
+aggrieved air.
+
+"Oh, Jimmie, I've been lookin' all over fer yehs--," she began.
+
+Jimmie made an impatient gesture and quickened his pace.
+
+"Ah, don't bodder me!  Good Gawd!" he said, with the savageness of a
+man whose life is pestered.
+
+The woman followed him along the sidewalk in somewhat the manner of a
+suppliant.
+
+"But, Jimmie," she said, "yehs told me ye'd--"
+
+Jimmie turned upon her fiercely as if resolved to make a last stand for
+comfort and peace.
+
+"Say, fer Gawd's sake, Hattie, don' foller me from one end of deh city
+teh deh odder.  Let up, will yehs!  Give me a minute's res', can't
+yehs?  Yehs makes me tired, allus taggin' me.  See?  Ain' yehs got no
+sense.  Do yehs want people teh get onto me?  Go chase yerself, fer
+Gawd's sake."
+
+The woman stepped closer and laid her fingers on his arm.  "But,
+look-a-here--"
+
+Jimmie snarled.  "Oh, go teh hell."
+
+He darted into the front door of a convenient saloon and a moment later
+came out into the shadows that surrounded the side door.  On the
+brilliantly lighted avenue he perceived the forlorn woman dodging about
+like a scout.  Jimmie laughed with an air of relief and went away.
+
+When he arrived home he found his mother clamoring.  Maggie had
+returned.  She stood shivering beneath the torrent of her mother's
+wrath.
+
+"Well, I'm damned," said Jimmie in greeting.
+
+His mother, tottering about the room, pointed a quivering forefinger.
+
+"Lookut her, Jimmie, lookut her.  Dere's yer sister, boy.  Dere's yer
+sister.  Lookut her!  Lookut her!"
+
+She screamed in scoffing laughter.
+
+The girl stood in the middle of the room.  She edged about as if unable
+to find a place on the floor to put her feet.
+
+"Ha, ha, ha," bellowed the mother.  "Dere she stands!  Ain' she purty?
+Lookut her!  Ain' she sweet, deh beast?  Lookut her!  Ha, ha, lookut
+her!"
+
+She lurched forward and put her red and seamed hands upon her
+daughter's face.  She bent down and peered keenly up into the eyes of
+the girl.
+
+"Oh, she's jes' dessame as she ever was, ain' she?  She's her mudder's
+purty darlin' yit, ain' she?  Lookut her, Jimmie!  Come here, fer
+Gawd's sake, and lookut her."
+
+The loud, tremendous sneering of the mother brought the denizens of the
+Rum Alley tenement to their doors.  Women came in the hallways.
+Children scurried to and fro.
+
+"What's up?  Dat Johnson party on anudder tear?"
+
+"Naw!  Young Mag's come home!"
+
+"Deh hell yeh say?"
+
+Through the open door curious eyes stared in at Maggie.  Children
+ventured into the room and ogled her, as if they formed the front row
+at a theatre.  Women, without, bended toward each other and whispered,
+nodding their heads with airs of profound philosophy.  A baby, overcome
+with curiosity concerning this object at which all were looking, sidled
+forward and touched her dress, cautiously, as if investigating a
+red-hot stove.  Its mother's voice rang out like a warning trumpet.
+She rushed forward and grabbed her child, casting a terrible look of
+indignation at the girl.
+
+Maggie's mother paced to and fro, addressing the doorful of eyes,
+expounding like a glib showman at a museum.  Her voice rang through the
+building.
+
+"Dere she stands," she cried, wheeling suddenly and pointing with
+dramatic finger.  "Dere she stands!  Lookut her!  Ain' she a dindy?
+An' she was so good as to come home teh her mudder, she was!  Ain' she
+a beaut'?  Ain' she a dindy?  Fer Gawd's sake!"
+
+The jeering cries ended in another burst of shrill laughter.
+
+The girl seemed to awaken.  "Jimmie--"
+
+He drew hastily back from her.
+
+"Well, now, yer a hell of a t'ing, ain' yeh?" he said, his lips curling
+in scorn.  Radiant virtue sat upon his brow and his repelling hands
+expressed horror of contamination.
+
+Maggie turned and went.
+
+The crowd at the door fell back precipitately.  A baby falling down in
+front of the door, wrenched a scream like a wounded animal from its
+mother.  Another woman sprang forward and picked it up, with a
+chivalrous air, as if rescuing a human being from an oncoming express
+train.
+
+As the girl passed down through the hall, she went before open doors
+framing more eyes strangely microscopic, and sending broad beams of
+inquisitive light into the darkness of her path.  On the second floor
+she met the gnarled old woman who possessed the music box.
+
+"So," she cried, "'ere yehs are back again, are yehs?  An' dey've
+kicked yehs out?  Well, come in an' stay wid me teh-night.  I ain' got
+no moral standin'."
+
+From above came an unceasing babble of tongues, over all of which rang
+the mother's derisive laughter.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+Pete did not consider that he had ruined Maggie.  If he had thought
+that her soul could never smile again, he would have believed the
+mother and brother, who were pyrotechnic over the affair, to be
+responsible for it.
+
+Besides, in his world, souls did not insist upon being able to smile.
+"What deh hell?"
+
+He felt a trifle entangled.  It distressed him.  Revelations and scenes
+might bring upon him the wrath of the owner of the saloon, who insisted
+upon respectability of an advanced type.
+
+"What deh hell do dey wanna raise such a smoke about it fer?" demanded
+he of himself, disgusted with the attitude of the family.  He saw no
+necessity for anyone's losing their equilibrium merely because their
+sister or their daughter had stayed away from home.
+
+Searching about in his mind for possible reasons for their conduct, he
+came upon the conclusion that Maggie's motives were correct, but that
+the two others wished to snare him.  He felt pursued.
+
+The woman of brilliance and audacity whom he had met in the hilarious
+hall showed a disposition to ridicule him.
+
+"A little pale thing with no spirit," she said.  "Did you note the
+expression of her eyes?  There was something in them about pumpkin pie
+and virtue.  That is a peculiar way the left corner of her mouth has of
+twitching, isn't it?  Dear, dear, my cloud-compelling Pete, what are
+you coming to?"
+
+Pete asserted at once that he never was very much interested in the
+girl.  The woman interrupted him, laughing.
+
+"Oh, it's not of the slightest consequence to me, my dear young man.
+You needn't draw maps for my benefit.  Why should I be concerned about
+it?"
+
+But Pete continued with his explanations.  If he was laughed at for his
+tastes in women, he felt obliged to say that they were only temporary
+or indifferent ones.
+
+The morning after Maggie had departed from home, Pete stood behind the
+bar.  He was immaculate in white jacket and apron and his hair was
+plastered over his brow with infinite correctness.  No customers were
+in the place.  Pete was twisting his napkined fist slowly in a beer
+glass, softly whistling to himself and occasionally holding the object
+of his attention between his eyes and a few weak beams of sunlight that
+had found their way over the thick screens and into the shaded room.
+
+With lingering thoughts of the woman of brilliance and audacity, the
+bartender raised his head and stared through the varying cracks between
+the swaying bamboo doors.  Suddenly the whistling pucker faded from his
+lips.  He saw Maggie walking slowly past.  He gave a great start,
+fearing for the previously-mentioned eminent respectability of the
+place.
+
+He threw a swift, nervous glance about him, all at once feeling guilty.
+No one was in the room.
+
+He went hastily over to the side door.  Opening it and looking out, he
+perceived Maggie standing, as if undecided, on the corner.  She was
+searching the place with her eyes.
+
+As she turned her face toward him Pete beckoned to her hurriedly,
+intent upon returning with speed to a position behind the bar and to
+the atmosphere of respectability upon which the proprietor insisted.
+
+Maggie came to him, the anxious look disappearing from her face and a
+smile wreathing her lips.
+
+"Oh, Pete--," she began brightly.
+
+The bartender made a violent gesture of impatience.
+
+"Oh, my Gawd," cried he, vehemently.  "What deh hell do yeh wanna hang
+aroun' here fer?  Do yeh wanna git me inteh trouble?" he demanded with
+an air of injury.
+
+Astonishment swept over the girl's features.  "Why, Pete! yehs tol'
+me--"
+
+Pete glanced profound irritation.  His countenance reddened with the
+anger of a man whose respectability is being threatened.
+
+"Say, yehs makes me tired.  See?  What deh hell deh yeh wanna tag
+aroun' atter me fer?  Yeh'll git me inteh trouble wid deh ol' man an'
+dey'll be hell teh pay!  If he sees a woman roun' here he'll go crazy
+an' I'll lose me job!  See?  Yer brudder come in here an' raised hell
+an' deh ol' man hada put up fer it!  An' now I'm done!  See?  I'm done."
+
+The girl's eyes stared into his face.  "Pete, don't yeh remem--"
+
+"Oh, hell," interrupted Pete, anticipating.
+
+The girl seemed to have a struggle with herself.  She was apparently
+bewildered and could not find speech.  Finally she asked in a low
+voice: "But where kin I go?"
+
+The question exasperated Pete beyond the powers of endurance.  It was a
+direct attempt to give him some responsibility in a matter that did not
+concern him.  In his indignation he volunteered information.
+
+"Oh, go teh hell," cried he.  He slammed the door furiously and
+returned, with an air of relief, to his respectability.
+
+Maggie went away.
+
+She wandered aimlessly for several blocks.  She stopped once and asked
+aloud a question of herself: "Who?"
+
+A man who was passing near her shoulder, humorously took the
+questioning word as intended for him.
+
+"Eh?  What?  Who?  Nobody!  I didn't say anything," he laughingly said,
+and continued his way.
+
+Soon the girl discovered that if she walked with such apparent
+aimlessness, some men looked at her with calculating eyes.  She
+quickened her step, frightened.  As a protection, she adopted a
+demeanor of intentness as if going somewhere.
+
+After a time she left rattling avenues and passed between rows of
+houses with sternness and stolidity stamped upon their features.  She
+hung her head for she felt their eyes grimly upon her.
+
+Suddenly she came upon a stout gentleman in a silk hat and a chaste
+black coat, whose decorous row of buttons reached from his chin to his
+knees.  The girl had heard of the Grace of God and she decided to
+approach this man.
+
+His beaming, chubby face was a picture of benevolence and
+kind-heartedness.  His eyes shone good-will.
+
+But as the girl timidly accosted him, he gave a convulsive movement and
+saved his respectability by a vigorous side-step.  He did not risk it
+to save a soul.  For how was he to know that there was a soul before
+him that needed saving?
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+Upon a wet evening, several months after the last chapter, two
+interminable rows of cars, pulled by slipping horses, jangled along a
+prominent side-street.  A dozen cabs, with coat-enshrouded drivers,
+clattered to and fro.  Electric lights, whirring softly, shed a blurred
+radiance.  A flower dealer, his feet tapping impatiently, his nose and
+his wares glistening with rain-drops, stood behind an array of roses
+and chrysanthemums.  Two or three theatres emptied a crowd upon the
+storm-swept pavements.  Men pulled their hats over their eyebrows and
+raised their collars to their ears.  Women shrugged impatient shoulders
+in their warm cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk
+through the storm.  People having been comparatively silent for two
+hours burst into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling
+from the glowings of the stage.
+
+The pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas.  Men stepped forth to
+hail cabs or cars, raising their fingers in varied forms of polite
+request or imperative demand.  An endless procession wended toward
+elevated stations.  An atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity seemed to
+hang over the throng, born, perhaps, of good clothes and of having just
+emerged from a place of forgetfulness.
+
+In the mingled light and gloom of an adjacent park, a handful of wet
+wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection, was scattered among the
+benches.
+
+A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street.  She
+threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling
+invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming
+sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their
+faces.
+
+Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the
+places of forgetfulness.  She hurried forward through the crowd as if
+intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in her handsome
+cloak, daintily lifting her skirts and picking for her well-shod feet
+the dryer spots upon the pavements.
+
+The restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro, disclosed animated
+rows of men before bars and hurrying barkeepers.
+
+A concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like
+music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening.
+
+A tall young man, smoking a cigarette with a sublime air, strolled near
+the girl.  He had on evening dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a
+look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye.  Seeing
+the girl walk on as if such a young man as he was not in existence, he
+looked back transfixed with interest.  He stared glassily for a moment,
+but gave a slight convulsive start when he discerned that she was
+neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical.  He wheeled about hastily and
+turned his stare into the air, like a sailor with a search-light.
+
+A stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers, went
+stolidly by, the broad of his back sneering at the girl.
+
+A belated man in business clothes, and in haste to catch a car, bounced
+against her shoulder.  "Hi, there, Mary, I beg your pardon!  Brace up,
+old girl."  He grasped her arm to steady her, and then was away running
+down the middle of the street.
+
+The girl walked on out of the realm of restaurants and saloons.  She
+passed more glittering avenues and went into darker blocks than those
+where the crowd travelled.
+
+A young man in light overcoat and derby hat received a glance shot
+keenly from the eyes of the girl.  He stopped and looked at her,
+thrusting his hands in his pockets and making a mocking smile curl his
+lips.  "Come, now, old lady," he said, "you don't mean to tel me that
+you sized me up for a farmer?"
+
+A labouring man marched along; with bundles under his arms. To her
+remarks, he replied, "It's a fine evenin', ain't it?"
+
+She smiled squarely into the face of a boy who was hurrying by with his
+hands buried in his overcoat pockets, his blonde locks bobbing on his
+youthful temples, and a cheery smile of unconcern upon his lips. He
+turned his head and smiled back at her, waving his hands.
+
+"Not this eve--some other eve!"
+
+A drunken man, reeling in her pathway, began to roar at her. "I ain' ga
+no money!" he shouted, in a dismal voice. He lurched on up the street,
+wailing to himself: "I ain' ga no money. Ba' luck. Ain' ga no more
+money."
+
+The girl went into gloomy districts near the river, where the tall
+black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of
+light fell across the pavements from saloons. In front of one of these
+places, whence came the sound of a violin vigorously scraped, the
+patter of feet on boards and the ring of loud laughter, there stood a
+man with blotched features.
+
+Further on in the darkness she met a ragged being with shifting,
+bloodshot eyes and grimy hands.
+
+She went into the blackness of the final block. The shutters of the
+tall buildings were closed like grim lips. The structures seemed to
+have eyes that looked over them, beyond them, at other things. Afar off
+the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance.
+Street-car bells jingled with a sound of merriment.
+
+At the feet of the tall buildings appeared the deathly black hue of the
+river. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a
+moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. The varied sounds of
+life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came
+faintly and died away to a silence.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+In a partitioned-off section of a saloon sat a man with a half dozen
+women, gleefully laughing, hovering about him.  The man had arrived at
+that stage of drunkenness where affection is felt for the universe.
+
+"I'm good f'ler, girls," he said, convincingly.  "I'm damn good f'ler.
+An'body treats me right, I allus trea's zem right!  See?"
+
+The women nodded their heads approvingly.  "To be sure," they cried out
+in hearty chorus.  "You're the kind of a man we like, Pete.  You're
+outa sight!  What yeh goin' to buy this time, dear?"
+
+"An't'ing yehs wants, damn it," said the man in an abandonment of good
+will.  His countenance shone with the true spirit of benevolence.  He
+was in the proper mode of missionaries.  He would have fraternized with
+obscure Hottentots.  And above all, he was overwhelmed in tenderness
+for his friends, who were all illustrious.
+
+"An't'ing yehs wants, damn it," repeated he, waving his hands with
+beneficent recklessness.  "I'm good f'ler, girls, an' if an'body treats
+me right I--here," called he through an open door to a waiter, "bring
+girls drinks, damn it.  What 'ill yehs have, girls?  An't'ing yehs
+wants, damn it!"
+
+The waiter glanced in with the disgusted look of the man who serves
+intoxicants for the man who takes too much of them.  He nodded his head
+shortly at the order from each individual, and went.
+
+"Damn it," said the man, "we're havin' heluva time.  I like you girls!
+Damn'd if I don't!  Yer right sort!  See?"
+
+He spoke at length and with feeling, concerning the excellencies of his
+assembled friends.
+
+"Don' try pull man's leg, but have a heluva time!  Das right!  Das way
+teh do!  Now, if I sawght yehs tryin' work me fer drinks, wouldn' buy
+damn t'ing!  But yer right sort, damn it!  Yehs know how ter treat a
+f'ler, an' I stays by yehs 'til spen' las' cent!  Das right!  I'm good
+f'ler an' I knows when an'body treats me right!"
+
+Between the times of the arrival and departure of the waiter, the man
+discoursed to the women on the tender regard he felt for all living
+things.  He laid stress upon the purity of his motives in all dealings
+with men in the world and spoke of the fervor of his friendship for
+those who were amiable.  Tears welled slowly from his eyes.  His voice
+quavered when he spoke to them.
+
+Once when the waiter was about to depart with an empty tray, the man
+drew a coin from his pocket and held it forth.
+
+"Here," said he, quite magnificently, "here's quar'."
+
+The waiter kept his hands on his tray.
+
+"I don' want yer money," he said.
+
+The other put forth the coin with tearful insistence.
+
+"Here, damn it," cried he, "tak't!  Yer damn goo' f'ler an' I wan' yehs
+tak't!"
+
+"Come, come, now," said the waiter, with the sullen air of a man who is
+forced into giving advice.  "Put yer mon in yer pocket!  Yer loaded an'
+yehs on'y makes a damn fool of yerself."
+
+As the latter passed out of the door the man turned pathetically to the
+women.
+
+"He don' know I'm damn goo' f'ler," cried he, dismally.
+
+"Never you mind, Pete, dear," said a woman of brilliance and audacity,
+laying her hand with great affection upon his arm.  "Never you mind,
+old boy!  We'll stay by you, dear!"
+
+"Das ri'," cried the man, his face lighting up at the soothing tones of
+the woman's voice.  "Das ri', I'm damn goo' f'ler an' w'en anyone
+trea's me ri', I treats zem ri'!  Shee!"
+
+"Sure!" cried the women.  "And we're not goin' back on you, old man."
+
+The man turned appealing eyes to the woman of brilliance and audacity.
+He felt that if he could be convicted of a contemptible action he would
+die.
+
+"Shay, Nell, damn it, I allus trea's yehs shquare, didn' I?  I allus
+been goo' f'ler wi' yehs, ain't I, Nell?"
+
+"Sure you have, Pete," assented the woman.  She delivered an oration to
+her companions.  "Yessir, that's a fact.  Pete's a square fellah, he
+is.  He never goes back on a friend.  He's the right kind an' we stay
+by him, don't we, girls?"
+
+"Sure," they exclaimed.  Looking lovingly at him they raised their
+glasses and drank his health.
+
+"Girlsh," said the man, beseechingly, "I allus trea's yehs ri', didn'
+I?  I'm goo' f'ler, ain' I, girlsh?"
+
+"Sure," again they chorused.
+
+"Well," said he finally, "le's have nozzer drink, zen."
+
+"That's right," hailed a woman, "that's right.  Yer no bloomin' jay!
+Yer spends yer money like a man.  Dat's right."
+
+The man pounded the table with his quivering fists.
+
+"Yessir," he cried, with deep earnestness, as if someone disputed him.
+"I'm damn goo' f'ler, an' w'en anyone trea's me ri', I allus
+trea's--le's have nozzer drink."
+
+He began to beat the wood with his glass.
+
+"Shay," howled he, growing suddenly impatient.  As the waiter did not
+then come, the man swelled with wrath.
+
+"Shay," howled he again.
+
+The waiter appeared at the door.
+
+"Bringsh drinksh," said the man.
+
+The waiter disappeared with the orders.
+
+"Zat f'ler damn fool," cried the man.  "He insul' me!  I'm ge'man!
+Can' stan' be insul'!  I'm goin' lickim when comes!"
+
+"No, no," cried the women, crowding about and trying to subdue him.
+"He's all right!  He didn't mean anything!  Let it go!  He's a good
+fellah!"
+
+"Din' he insul' me?" asked the man earnestly.
+
+"No," said they.  "Of course he didn't!  He's all right!"
+
+"Sure he didn' insul' me?" demanded the man, with deep anxiety in his
+voice.
+
+"No, no!  We know him!  He's a good fellah.  He didn't mean anything."
+
+"Well, zen," said the man, resolutely, "I'm go' 'pol'gize!"
+
+When the waiter came, the man struggled to the middle of the floor.
+
+"Girlsh shed you insul' me!  I shay damn lie!  I 'pol'gize!"
+
+"All right," said the waiter.
+
+The man sat down.  He felt a sleepy but strong desire to straighten
+things out and have a perfect understanding with everybody.
+
+"Nell, I allus trea's yeh shquare, din' I?  Yeh likes me, don' yehs,
+Nell?  I'm goo' f'ler?"
+
+"Sure," said the woman of brilliance and audacity.
+
+"Yeh knows I'm stuck on yehs, don' yehs, Nell?"
+
+"Sure," she repeated, carelessly.
+
+Overwhelmed by a spasm of drunken adoration, he drew two or three bills
+from his pocket, and, with the trembling fingers of an offering priest,
+laid them on the table before the woman.
+
+"Yehs knows, damn it, yehs kin have all got, 'cause I'm stuck on yehs,
+Nell, damn't, I--I'm stuck on yehs, Nell--buy drinksh--damn't--we're
+havin' heluva time--w'en anyone trea's me ri'--I--damn't, Nell--we're
+havin' heluva--time."
+
+Shortly he went to sleep with his swollen face fallen forward on his
+chest.
+
+The women drank and laughed, not heeding the slumbering man in the
+corner.  Finally he lurched forward and fell groaning to the floor.
+
+The women screamed in disgust and drew back their skirts.
+
+"Come ahn," cried one, starting up angrily, "let's get out of here."
+
+The woman of brilliance and audacity stayed behind, taking up the bills
+and stuffing them into a deep, irregularly-shaped pocket.  A guttural
+snore from the recumbent man caused her to turn and look down at him.
+
+She laughed.  "What a damn fool," she said, and went.
+
+The smoke from the lamps settled heavily down in the little
+compartment, obscuring the way out.  The smell of oil, stifling in its
+intensity, pervaded the air.  The wine from an overturned glass dripped
+softly down upon the blotches on the man's neck.
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+In a room a woman sat at a table eating like a fat monk in a picture.
+
+A soiled, unshaven man pushed open the door and entered.
+
+"Well," said he, "Mag's dead."
+
+"What?" said the woman, her mouth filled with bread.
+
+"Mag's dead," repeated the man.
+
+"Deh hell she is," said the woman.  She continued her meal.  When she
+finished her coffee she began to weep.
+
+"I kin remember when her two feet was no bigger dan yer t'umb, and she
+weared worsted boots," moaned she.
+
+"Well, whata dat?" said the man.
+
+"I kin remember when she weared worsted boots," she cried.
+
+The neighbors began to gather in the hall, staring in at the weeping
+woman as if watching the contortions of a dying dog.  A dozen women
+entered and lamented with her.  Under their busy hands the rooms took
+on that appalling appearance of neatness and order with which death is
+greeted.
+
+Suddenly the door opened and a woman in a black gown rushed in with
+outstretched arms.  "Ah, poor Mary," she cried, and tenderly embraced
+the moaning one.
+
+"Ah, what ter'ble affliction is dis," continued she.  Her vocabulary
+was derived from mission churches.  "Me poor Mary, how I feel fer yehs!
+Ah, what a ter'ble affliction is a disobed'ent chil'."
+
+Her good, motherly face was wet with tears.  She trembled in eagerness
+to express her sympathy.  The mourner sat with bowed head, rocking her
+body heavily to and fro, and crying out in a high, strained voice that
+sounded like a dirge on some forlorn pipe.
+
+"I kin remember when she weared worsted boots an' her two feets was no
+bigger dan yer t'umb an' she weared worsted boots, Miss Smith," she
+cried, raising her streaming eyes.
+
+"Ah, me poor Mary," sobbed the woman in black.  With low, coddling
+cries, she sank on her knees by the mourner's chair, and put her arms
+about her.  The other women began to groan in different keys.
+
+"Yer poor misguided chil' is gone now, Mary, an' let us hope it's fer
+deh bes'.  Yeh'll fergive her now, Mary, won't yehs, dear, all her
+disobed'ence?  All her t'ankless behavior to her mudder an' all her
+badness?  She's gone where her ter'ble sins will be judged."
+
+The woman in black raised her face and paused.  The inevitable sunlight
+came streaming in at the windows and shed a ghastly cheerfulness upon
+the faded hues of the room.  Two or three of the spectators were
+sniffling, and one was loudly weeping.  The mourner arose and staggered
+into the other room.  In a moment she emerged with a pair of faded baby
+shoes held in the hollow of her hand.
+
+"I kin remember when she used to wear dem," cried she.  The women burst
+anew into cries as if they had all been stabbed.  The mourner turned to
+the soiled and unshaven man.
+
+"Jimmie, boy, go git yer sister!  Go git yer sister an' we'll put deh
+boots on her feets!"
+
+"Dey won't fit her now, yeh damn fool," said the man.
+
+"Go git yer sister, Jimmie," shrieked the woman, confronting him
+fiercely.
+
+The man swore sullenly.  He went over to a corner and slowly began to
+put on his coat.  He took his hat and went out, with a dragging,
+reluctant step.
+
+The woman in black came forward and again besought the mourner.
+
+"Yeh'll fergive her, Mary!  Yeh'll fergive yer bad, bad, chil'!  Her
+life was a curse an' her days were black an' yeh'll fergive yer bad
+girl?  She's gone where her sins will be judged."
+
+"She's gone where her sins will be judged," cried the other women, like
+a choir at a funeral.
+
+"Deh Lord gives and deh Lord takes away," said the woman in black,
+raising her eyes to the sunbeams.
+
+"Deh Lord gives and deh Lord takes away," responded the others.
+
+"Yeh'll fergive her, Mary!" pleaded the woman in black.  The mourner
+essayed to speak but her voice gave way.  She shook her great shoulders
+frantically, in an agony of grief.  Hot tears seemed to scald her
+quivering face.  Finally her voice came and arose like a scream of pain.
+
+"Oh, yes, I'll fergive her!  I'll fergive her!"
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 447 ***