d a first-class tailor. But," and the former
proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and
picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better
with the ladies."

V

SOMEBODY'S MOTHER

The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost
steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and
local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters,
and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come
out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood
policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people
who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on
their way for dinner to a French _table d'hote_ which they had heard
of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son
and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that
controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the
steps.

It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly.
"She seems to be sick or something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or
asleep."

The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They
would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid
upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn,
and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress,
which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would
not have dressed so for that problematical French _table d'hote_;
probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in
effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.

"She seems to be asleep," he reported.

"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death
there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left
it to the father, and he said:

"Probably somebody will come by."

"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.

"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.

"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited,
helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working
class; she w