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By Root 2858 0

fifteen minutes later when they left, and had their coffee and doughnuts before they took the underground uptown. While they had their coffee, and on the ride uptown, they talked, principally about Florence, how badly people treated her, and how empty her life was now that her husband was dead. He had adored her, she told Elizabeth, and satisfied her every whim, but he had tended to irresponsibility. If she had told him once, she had told him a hundred times: ‘Frank, you better take out life insurance.’ But he had thought—and wasn’t it just like a man!—that he would live for ever. Now here she was, a woman getting along in years, forced to make her living among all the black scum of this wicked city. Elizabeth, a little astonished at the need for confession betrayed by this proud woman, listened, nevertheless, with great sympathy. She was very grateful for Florence’s interest. Florence was so much older and seemed so kind.

It was no doubt this, Florence’s age and kindness, that led Elizabeth, with no premeditation, to take Florence into her confidence. Looking back, she found it hard to believe that she could have been so desperate, or so childish; though, again, on looking back, she was able to see clearly what she then so incoherently felt: how much she needed another human being, somewhere, who knew the truth about her.

Florence had often said how glad she would be to make the acquaintance of little Johnny; she was sure, she said, that any child of Elizabeth’s must be a wonderful child. On a Sunday near the end of that summer, Elizabeth dressed him in his best clothes and took him to Florence’s house. She was oddly and fearfully depressed that day; and John was not in a good mood. She found herself staring at him darkly, as though she were trying to read his future in his face. He would grow big one day, he would talk, and he would ask her questions. What questions would he ask her, what answers would she give? She surely would not be able to lie to him indefinitely about his father, for one day he would be old enough to realize that it was not his father’s name he bore. Richard had been a fatherless child, she helplessly, bitterly remembered as she carried John through the busy, summer, Sunday streets. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. Yes, down the line, through poverty, hunger, wandering, cruelty, fear, and trembling, to death. And she thought of the boys who had gone to prison. Were they there still? Would John be one of these boys one day? These boys, now, who stood before drug-store windows, before pool-rooms, on every street corner, who whistled after her, whose lean bodies fairly rang, it seemed, with idleness, and malice, and frustration. How could she hope, alone, and in famine as she was, to put herself between him and this so wide and raging destruction? And then, as though to confirm her in all her dark imaginings, he began, as she reached the underground steps, to whimper, and moan, and cry.

And he kept this up, too, all the way uptown—so that, what with the impossibility of pleasing him that day, no matter what she did, what with restless weight, and the heat, and the smiling, staring people, and the strange dread that weighed on her so heavily, she was nearly ready to weep by the time she arrived at Florence’s door.

He, at that moment, to her exasperated relief, became the most cheerful of infants. Florence was wearing a heavy, old-fashioned garnet brooch, which, as she opened the door, immediately attracted John’s eye. He began reaching for the brooch and babbling and spitting at Florence as though he had known her all of his short life.

‘Well!’ said Florence, ‘when he get big enough to really go after the ladies you going to have your hands full, girl.’

‘That,’ said Elizabeth, grimly, ‘is the Lord’s truth. He keeps me so busy now I don’t know half the time if I’m coming or going.’

Florence, meanwhile, attempted to distract John’s attention from the brooch by offering him an orange; but he had seen oranges before; he merely looked at it a moment before letting it