we can do nuttin'. Somebody stole it from right
behind you there--no one was looking. If you leaf your name and
address--"

Father didn't even hear him. He was muttering to himself, "And the seven
dollars that I saved for Sarah was in it."

He took Mother's arm; he tried to walk straight as he turned his back on
the storm of windy words from the manager.

Once they were away from spectators, on dark Fifteenth Street, Father
threw up his hands and in a voice of utter agony he mourned, "I can't do
anything more. I'm clean beaten. I've tried, and I've looked for work,
but now-- Be better if I went and jumped in the river."

She took his arm and led him along, as though he were a child and
helpless. She comforted him as well as she could, but there was nothing
very convincing to say. As she grew silent her thoughts grew noisy. They
shouted separate, hard, brutal sentences, so loudly that she could not
hear even the scraping feet of the stooped man beside her. They
clamored:

"I can't do anything more, either.

"I don't believe I will be kept on at the store, after all. Only through
January, anyway.

"All the money we've got now is the nine dollars they gave me to-day.

"Suppose that's been stolen, too, from our room.

"Suppose I died.

"What would happen to Father if I died? He'd have to go--some dreadful
place--poor-house or some place--

"What would happen to me if he died? I'd be so lonely I couldn't stand
it. He's always been so dear to me.

"That clerk in the book-department that died from asphyxiation--I wonder
if it was accident, after all. They said so, but she was so unhappy and
all when she talked to me at lunch.

"'Better jump in the river.' That would be cold and he hasn't got an
overcoat. No, of course, that wouldn't make any difference--

"I wonder if gas suicide hurts much?

"If we could only die together and neither of us be left--

"God wouldn't call that suicide--oh, He couldn't, not when there's two
people that nobody wants and they don't ask anything but just to be
together. That nobody really wants--my daughter don't--except maybe the
Tubbses. And they are so poor, too. Nobody needs us and we just want to
find a happy way to go off together where we can sleep! Oh, I wouldn't
think that would be wrong, would it?"

They were at home. She hastened to burrow among the pile of stewpans for
the nine dollars, her week's salary, which she had hidden there. When
she found that it was safe,