le girl had a veil on. Next I remarked that if a strange lady
spoke to me my mother seemed pleased--but if a man noticed me she was not
pleased, and once when a big man took me by the hand and led me to a
candy store for some candy she was as white as could be and so angry she
frightened me, and she promised me a severe punishment if I ever, ever
went one step with a strange man again. And so my fear began to take the
form of a man, of a big, smiling man--for my mother always asked, when I
reported that a stranger had spoken to me, if he was big and smiling.

I had known the sensation of hunger long before I knew the word that
expressed it, and I often pressed my hands over my small empty stomach,
and cried and pulled at my mother's dress skirt. If there was anything at
all to give I received it, but sometimes there was absolutely nothing but
a drink of water to offer, which checked the gnawing for a moment or two,
and at those times there was a tightening of my mother's trembling lips,
and a straight up and down wrinkle between her brows, that I grew to
know, and when I saw that look on her face I could not ask for anything
more than "a dwink, please."

As an illustration of her almost savage pride and honesty: I one day saw
a woman in front of the house buying some potatoes. I knew that potatoes
cooked were very comforting to empty stomachs. One or two of them fell to
the street during the measuring and I picked one up, and, fairly wild
with delight, I scrambled up the stairs with it. But my mother was angry
through and through.

"Who gave it to you?" she demanded.

I explained with a trembling voice: "I des' founded it on the very
ground--and I'se so hungry!"

But hungry or not hungry, I had to take the potato back: "Nothing in the
world could be taken without asking--that was stealing--and she was the
only person in the world I had a right to ask anything of!"

It was a bitter lesson, and was rendered more so by the fact that when I
carried the tear-bathed potato back to the street and laid it down,
neither the woman who bought nor the man who sold was in sight--and, dear
Heaven! I could almost have eaten it raw.

But I was learning obedience and self-respect; more than that, I was
already acquiring one of the necessary qualities for an actress--the
power of close observation.

The next four years (the second group) were the hardest to endure of them
all. True, I now had sufficient food and warmth, since my