fraid I can do
nothing for you." And with that she went out of the room, leaving me, I
must confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly declared against wearing
the definite badge of servitude.

V

IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART OF BOX-MAKING

The "lady-buffer" and I were the last to leave the house. We went out
together and parted company at Third Avenue, she going south to her
work, and I continuing along the street westward. The catastrophe of the
preceding day seemed to have entirely evaporated from her memory; she
seemed also to have forgotten the incident of our meeting and
conversation of the night before, for she made no comment, nor even gave
me a parting greeting.

I was inclined to reproach such heartlessness as I hurried along, when
suddenly it was borne in upon my consciousness that it was I, not she,
who was open to that charge. Here I was, speeding along to my work with
hope in my heart, sometimes almost forgetting that the woman who had
been so kind to me was probably lying in the morgue, awaiting burial in
the Potter's Field, unless saved from that ignoble end by some friend.
And yet I was powerless. I could not even spare time to go to the morgue
or to make inquiries. I knew not a soul who could have helped me, and I
had only one dollar and a half in all the world, no place to sleep that
night, no change of garments, nothing except the promise of work that
morning at Springer's. I stopped at the corner, strongly tempted by my
innate sense of decency to the memory of the dead. But only for a
moment: the law of life--self-preservation--again asserted itself, and
for the time being I put the past behind me and hurried on toward
Thompson Street.

It lacked but a few minutes of eight o'clock when, at last, I turned
into the squalid street at the end of which stands Springer's. In the
sunshine of the mild March morning the facade of the tall buff building
looked for all the world like a gaunt, ugly, unkempt hag, frowning
between bleared old eyes that seemed to coax--nay, rather to coerce me
into entering her awful house.

The instant impression was one of repulsion, and the impulse was to run
away. But there was fascination, too, in the hag-like visage of those
grim brick walls, checkered with innumerable dirty windows and trussed
up, like a paralytic old crone, with rusty fire-escapes. It was the
fascination of the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and
forbidding as was