myself might get coarsened.
She thought, I think, without ever exactly saying so to herself that
in our ambition to forge ahead we might lose some of the finer
standards of life. She was bucking against that tendency all the
time. That's why she made me shave every morning, that's why she made
me keep my shoes blacked, that's why she made us both dress up on
Sunday whether we went to church or not. She for her part kept herself
looking even more trig than when she had the fear that Mrs. Grover
might drop in at any time. And every night at dinner she presided with
as much form as though she were entertaining a dinner party. I guess
she thought we might learn to eat with our knives if she didn't.

"Well," I said, "your word is final. But let's look at this first as a
straight business proposition."

So I went over the scheme just as I had to myself.

"These boys aren't beggars," I said. "They are little business men.
And as a matter of fact most of them are earning as much as their
fathers. The trouble is that they've been given a black eye by
well-meaning sympathizers who haven't taken the trouble to find out
just what the actual facts are. A group of big-hearted women who see
their own chickens safely rounded up at six every night, find the
newsboys on the street as they themselves are on their way to the
opera and conclude it's a great hardship and that the lads must be
homeless and suffering. Maybe they even find a case or two which
justifies this theory. But on the whole they are simply comparing the
outside of these boys' lives with the lives of their own sheltered
boys. They don't stop to consider that these lads are toughened and
that they'd probably be on the street anyway. And they don't figure
out how much they earn or what that amount stands for down here."

Ruth listened and then she said:

"But isn't it a pity that the boys _are_ toughened, Billy?"

"No," I said, "it would be a pity if they weren't. They wouldn't last
a year. We have to have some seasoned fighters in the world."

"But Dick--"

"Dick has found his feet now. The suggestion was his own. Personally I
believe in letting him try it."

"All right, Billy," she said.

But she said it in such a sad sort of way that I said:

"If you're going to worry about him, this ends it. But I'd like to see
the boy so well seasoned that you won't have to worry about him no
matter where he is, no matter what he's doing."

"You're right," she said, "I