The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began
walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.

The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along,
enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She
must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from
one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the
mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville
ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which,
when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor
under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this
colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know
her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world
might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected
her. "Somebody's mother"--he liked that.

They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the _table d'hote_
where they had meant to dine was in that direction; they had heard of
it as an amusingly harmless French place, and they were fond of such
mild adventures.

The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress.
She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth
she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"--the colored girl
translated some obscure avowal across her back--"she says she wants to
go home, and she lives up in Harlem."

"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic
amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put
her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."

He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it
in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The
daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing
policeman to take the old woman in charge.

No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them
without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which
their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the
avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was
moved by the sense of anything odd in them.

The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they
were midway between Seventh