:

"And ... would you send me off, too? The new war?"

She could scarcely speak.

"Whereto?"

"I ... oh, I'll have to go down in a tenement somewhere--the slums...."

"Well, then," she said, quietly, "I'll go with you."

"But you--" he exclaimed, almost adding, "an old woman"--"it's
impossible, mother."

She answered him with the same quietness.

"You forget the shanty."

And then it was clear to him. Like an electric bolt it shot him,
thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She _would_ go with him; more
than that, she _should_. It was her right, won by years of actual want
and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale,
meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was
really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in
its miraculousness.

But he only said, in a strained voice,

"All right, mother!"

And she laughed, and mused, and murmured:

"How does the world manage to keep so new and young?"

V

MYRA AND JOE

Myra Craig used to dream at night that the fifty-seven members of her
class arose from their desks with wild shrieks and danced a war-dance
about her. This paralyzed her throat, her hands, and her feet, and she
could only stand, flooded with horror, awaiting the arrival of the
school principal and disgrace. Out of this teacher's dream she always
awoke disgusted with school-work.

Myra came from Fall River--her parents still lived there--came when she
was ten years younger, to seek her fortune in the great city. New York
had drawn her as it draws all the youth of the land, for youth lusts for
life and rushes eagerly to the spot where life is most intense and most
exciting. The romance of crowds, of wealth, of art, of concentrated
pleasure and concentrated vice, of immense money-power, the very
architecture of the world-city, the maelstrom of people, drew the young
Fall River woman irresistibly. She did not want the even and smooth
future of a little town; she wanted to plunge into the hazardous
interweaving of the destinies of millions of people. She wanted to
grasp at some of the magic opportunities of the city. She wanted a
career.

And so she came. Early that June morning she left her cabin on the Sound
steamboat and went out on deck, and then she had unfolded to her the
most thrilling scene of the earth. Gazing, almost panting with
excitement, it seemed to her that the nature she had known--the hills
and fields of