potential
motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age--all this she knit into
the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put
their questions to their gods.

Harriet was deeply moved. Too much that Tillie poured out to her found
an echo in her own breast. What was this thing she was striving for but
a substitute for the real things of life--love and tenderness, children,
a home of her own? Quite suddenly she loathed the gray carpet on the
floor, the pink chairs, the shaded lamps. Tillie was no longer the
waitress at a cheap boarding-house. She loomed large, potential,
courageous, a woman who held life in her hands.

"Why don't you go to Mrs. Rosenfeld? She's your aunt, isn't she?"

"She thinks any woman's a fool to take up with a man."

"You're giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you're asking my
advice."

"No'm. I'm asking what you'd do if it happened to you. Suppose you had
no people that cared anything about you, nobody to disgrace, and all
your life nobody had really cared anything about you. And then a chance
like this came along. What would you do?"

"I don't know," said poor Harriet. "It seems to me--I'm afraid I'd be
tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even
if--"

Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not
she, had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter,
the insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right
can be built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At
last, when Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.

"I know how you feel, and I don't want you to take the responsibility of
advising me," she said quietly. "I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But
before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think
the way I do about it."

And so, for a time, Tillie went out of the life of the Street as she
went out of Harriet's handsome rooms, quietly, unobtrusively, with calm
purpose in her eyes.

There were other changes in the Street. The Lorenz house was being
painted for Christine's wedding. Johnny Rosenfeld, not perhaps of the
Street itself, but certainly pertaining to it, was learning to drive
Palmer Howe's new car, in mingled agony and bliss. He walked along the
Street, not "right foot, left foot," but "brake foot, clutch foot," and
took to calling off the vintage of passing cars. "So-and-So 1910,"
he would say, with contempt in