ractically deserted of everything save the noise and smoke
overhead. There were no foot-passengers, no human sounds. It was all so
hideous and fearsome that after five minutes' walk I was not surprised
to see Henrietta select the most wretched of all the wretched houses as
the one we should enter. As we climbed the high stoop, I could see,
through the interstices of rusted ironwork that had once been handsome
balusters, the form of an Italian woman sitting in the basement window
beneath, nursing a baby at her breast.

"That's the lady what come up to help hold Fanny Harley," my room-mate
remarked as we passed inside.

IX

INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND"

"Say! ain't you got no special gentleman-friend?"

Henrietta's voice, breaking a pregnant silence, startled me so that I
nearly jumped off the empty soap-box where for some minutes I had sat
watching her bend over a smoking skillet of frying fat.

An answer was not to be given unadvisedly, such was the moral effect of
the question. It hadn't been asked in a casual way, but showed, by its
explosive form of utterance, that it was the result not so much of a
pent-up curiosity as of a careful speculation as to the manner in which
I would receive it. So I tried to look unconscious, and at this critical
juncture the thunder of an elevated train came adventitiously to my
rescue and gave me a few moments in which to consider what I should
reply. And as I considered unconsciously my eye took in an inventory of
the room. The heavily carved woodwork hinted of the fact that it had
once been a lady's bedchamber in the bygone days when this was a
fashionable quarter of New York, and its spaciousness and former
elegance now served rather to increase the squalor as well as to
accentuate the barrenness of its furnishings. The latter consisted of
two wooden boxes, one of which I sat upon; an empty sugar-barrel, with a
board laid across the top; a broken-down bed in an uncurtained alcove; a
very large, substantial-looking trunk, iron-bound and brass-riveted; and
last, but not least, a rusty stove, now red-hot, which might well have
been the twin sister of my own "Little Lottie" at the ill-fated
Fourteenth-street house. This stove, connected with the flue by a small
pipe, fitted into what had once been a beautiful open fireplace, but
which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel
of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometh