e
were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of
a kindergarten. The men on the steps--all in their shirt sleeves,
their vests unbuttoned--sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs
comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told
anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They
occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their
own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their
legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at
school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in
their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest
step of his stoop, staring into the street, while his sisters, in their
rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about how
many shirtwaists they had made in the last week, and bow many waffles
someone had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm,
and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls
made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher,
ornamented with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought
very fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious color of
the pitcher.

Today Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who
shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young
man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his
father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a
ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, nearsighted
eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved
about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel
corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with
a future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was now barely
twenty-six--he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order to curb his
appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of
wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft
reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first
woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to
be an angular schoolmistress, much older than he, who also wore thick
glasses, and who had now borne him four chi