sunlight of the street she glanced at
her watch and saw, with an almost overwhelming surprise, that it was only
four o'clock. It was just an hour since she had entered the cavern-like
doorway of the tenement. But in that hour she had come, for the first
time, against life in the rough. She had seen degeneracy, and poverty,
and--she was thinking of the expression in Jim's eyes--a menace that she
did not at all understand. She had seen the waste of broken middle age
and the pity of blighted childhood. She had seen fear and, if she had
stayed a few moments longer, she would have seen downright brutality. Her
hand, reaching out, clutched Bennie's hand.

"Dear," she said--and realized, from the startled expression of his eyes,
that he had not often been called "Dear,"--"is it always like that, in
your home?"

Bennie looked up into her eyes. He seemed, somehow, younger than he had
appeared the day before, younger and softer.

"Yes, Miss," he told her, "it's always like that, except when it's
worse!"

"And," Rose-Marie was still asking questions, "do your older sister and
brother just drift in, at any time, like that? And is your father home in
the middle of the day? Don't any of them work?"

Bennie's barriers of shyness had been burned away by the warmth of her
friendship. He was in a mood to tell anything.

"Pa, he works sometimes," he said. "An' Ella--she uster work till she had
a fight with her boss last week. An' now she says she ain't gotta work no
more 'cause there's a feller as will give her everythin' she wants, if
she says th' word! An' Jim--I ain't never seen him do nothin', but he
always has a awful lot o' money. He must do his workin' at night--after
I'm asleep!"

Rose-Marie, her mind working rapidly, realized that Bennie had given
revelations of which he did not even dream. Pa--his condition was what
she had supposed it to be--but Ella was drifting toward danger-shoals
that she had never imagined! Well she knew the conditions under which a
girl of Ella's financial status stops working--she had heard many such
cases discussed, with an amazing frankness, during her short stay at the
Settlement House. And Jim--Jim with his sleek, patent-leather hair, and
his rat-like face--Jim did his work at night! Rose-Marie could not
suppress the shudder that ran over her. Quickly she changed the subject
to the one bright spot in the Volsky family--to Lily.

"Your little sister," she asked Bennie, "has she always been a