y fashion. The men sat placidly on gay cushions
placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in
their Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there
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 shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles
some one 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 neighbours joked about the suspicious colour of the pitcher.

Today Paul's father, on the top step, was 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, near-sighted
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