anced services and
effects without exacting or indeed expecting any return.

When the tea was balanced insecurely on the bed, the two teacups on
one side of her legs, the three-quarters of a loaf and the tin of
condensed milk on the other, Mary sat down with great care, and all
through the breakfast her mother culled from her capacious memory a
list of kindnesses of which she had been the recipient or the witness.
Mary supplemented the recital by incidents from her own observation.
She had often seen a man in the street give a penny to an old woman.
She had often seen old women give things to other old women. She knew
many people who never looked for the halfpenny change from a newsboy.
Mrs. Makebelieve applauded the justice of such transactions; they
were, she admitted, the things she would do herself if she were in a
position to be careless; but a person to whom the discovery of her
daily bread is a daily problem, and who can scarcely keep pace with
the ever-changing terms of the problem, is not in a position to be
careless.--"Grind, grind, grind," said Mrs. Makebelieve, "that is life
for me, and if I ceased to grind for an instant ..." she flickered her
thin hand into a nowhere of terror. Her attitude was that when one had
enough one should give the residue to some one who had not enough. It
was her woe, it stabbed her to the heart, to see desolate people
dragging through the streets, standing to glare through the windows of
bakeries and confectioners' shops, and little children in some of
these helpless arms! Thinking of these, she said that every morsel she
ate would choke her were it not for her own hunger. But maybe, said
she, catching a providential glance of the golden-tinted window, maybe
these poor people were not as poor as they seemed: surely they had
ways of collecting a living which other people did not know anything
about. It might be that they got lots of money from kind-hearted
people, and food at hospitable doors, and here and there clothing and
oddments which, if they did not wear, they knew how to dispose of
advantageously. What extremes of ways and means such people must be
acquainted with! no ditch was too low to rummage in, no rat-hole too
hidden to be ravaged; a gate represented something to be climbed over:
an open door was an invitation, a locked one a challenge. They could
dodge under the fences of the law and climb the barbed wire of
morality with equal impunity, and the utmost rigor of puni