ve
cent cake of soap would have made the rooms clean as a whistle and
there were two women to do the scrubbing. I didn't leave my fifty
cents but I came back upstairs with a better appreciation, if that
were possible, of what such a woman as Ruth means to a man. Even the
baby began to get better as soon as the district nurse drove into the
parent's head a few facts about sensible infant feeding.

I don't want to make out that life is all beer and skittles for the
tenement dwellers. It isn't. But I ran across any number of such cases
as this where conditions were not nearly so bad as they appeared on
the surface. Taking into account the number of people who were
gathered together here in a small area I didn't see among the
temperate and able-bodied any worse examples of hard luck than I saw
among my former associates. In fact of sheer abstract hard luck I
didn't see as much. In seventy-five per cent of the cases the
conditions were of their own making--either the man was a drunkard or
the women slovenly or the whole family was just naturally vicious.
Ignorance may excuse some of this but not all of it. Perhaps I'm not
what you'd call sympathetic but I've heard a lot of men talk about
these people in a way that sounds to me like twaddle. I never ran
across a family down here in such misery as that which Steve
Bonnington's wife endured for years without a whimper.

Bonnington was a clerk with a big insurance company. He lived four
houses below us on our street. I suppose he was earning about eighteen
hundred dollars a year when he died. He left five children and he
never had money enough even to insure in his own company. He didn't
leave a cent. When Helen Bonnington came back from the grave it was to
face the problem of supporting unaided, either by experience or
relatives, five children ranging from twelve to one. She was a shy,
retiring little body who had sapped her strength in just bringing the
children into the world and caring for them in the privacy of her
home. She had neither the temperament nor the training to face the
world. But she bucked up to it. She sold out of the house what things
she could spare, secured cheap rooms on the outskirts of the
neighborhood and announced that she would do sewing. What it cost her
to come back among her old friends and do that is a particularly
choice type of agony that it would be impossible for a tenement widow
to appreciate. And this same self-respect which both Helen's e