us years with as little damage to his moral fiber
as seemed reasonably possible. And now, not without some pangs of
maternal jealousy, but with none of the baser kind, she listened while
he sat at her feet and talked of the woman he loved. But the real price
to be paid, as she clearly saw, lay still in the future and in all those
possibilities of beautiful domestic possession wherein she could have no
part. Left to herself she sometimes wept in woeful abandonment at the
thought that she and his children must for ever remain strangers; and
then she dried her eyes and sat eager and attentive to learn what manner
of woman their mother would be, if Max had his present will.

"I met her," said Max, "or rather found her again, washing the floor of
a single-room tenement on a 'four-pair back' to the accompaniment of
screams from its enraged occupant. And when, as a means of introduction,
I tendered assistance, she sent me down to the basement to refill her
bucket,--offered me a child's head to wash, and then as an alternative
bade me bring in a mattress from a second-hand dealer who had neglected
to send it. I went. Required to give proofs of my honesty by a shopman
who rightly regarded all strangers with suspicion, I deposited the
value, which I forgot afterwards to reclaim, and set off with my load.
Before I reached the first corner I made the humiliating discovery that
I did not know how to carry it. I was bearing it embraced like an infant
in arms, but owing to its size my arms would not go round. Twice it
unrolled itself and lay like a drunken thing in the gutter; small
children stood round and laughed at me. From one of them came these
words of wisdom: 'Lor', 'e's only a gentleman, he don't know nothing!'
On my second attempt, not seeing well where I was going, I stumbled into
an apple-stall; and immediately I, heir to a throne and engaged in a
charitable action, found myself regarded as a criminal lunatic by people
quite obviously my superiors in all honest ways of earning a living. A
small boy took pity on me and offered to carry it on his back--any
distance for a penny. That taught me; I gave him the penny and put it
upon my own, and having disentangled myself from the crowd in which for
foolishness I had become conspicuous, found with relief that thenceforth
no one took any notice of me. The old scriptural act of a man carrying
his bed struck nobody there as absurd; the streets of our sweated
quarters are far more gen