ducation
and her environment forced her to maintain, handicapped her in other
ways. You couldn't give Mrs. Bonnington scraps from your table; you
couldn't give her old clothes or old shoes or money. It wasn't her
fault because this was so; it wasn't your fault.

When her children were sick she couldn't send them off to the public
wards of the hospitals. In the first place half the hospitals wouldn't
take them as charity patients simply because she maintained a certain
dignity, and in the second place the idea, by education, was so
repugnant to her that it never entered her head to try. So she stayed
at home and sewed from daylight until she couldn't hold open her eyes
at night. That's where you get your true "Song of the Shirt." She not
only sewed her fingers to the bone but while doing it she suffered a
very fine kind of torture wondering what would happen to the five if
she broke down. Asylums and homes and hospitals don't imply any great
disgrace to most of the tenement dwellers but to a woman of that type
they mean Hell. God knows how she did it but she kept the five alive
and clothed and in school until the boy was about fifteen and went to
work. When I hear of the lone widows of the tenements, who are apt to
be very husky, and who work out with no great mental struggle and who
have clothes and food given them and who set the children to work as
soon as they are able to walk, I feel like getting up in my seat and
telling about Helen Bonnington--a plain middle-classer. And she was no
exception either.

I seem to have rambled off a bit here but this was only one of many
contrasts which I made in these years which seemed to me to be all in
favor of my new neighbors. The point is that at the bottom you not
only see advantages you didn't see before but you're in a position to
use them. You aren't shackled by conventions; you aren't cramped by
caste. The world stands ready to help the under dog but before it will
lift a finger it wants to see the dog stretched out on its back with
all four legs sticking up in prayer. Of the middle-class dog who
fights on and on, even after he's wobbly and can't see, it doesn't
seem to take much notice.

However Ruth started in with a few reforms of her own. She made it a
point to go down and see young Michele every day and watch that he
didn't get any more macaroni and gravy. The youngster himself resented
this interference but the parents took it in good part. Then in time
she ventu