r, which stood apart as if it were the
pedestal of an idol, a baby, with the smooth unlined face not of an
infant, but of a philosopher, was mutely surveying the scene.

More than anything else in the room, more even than the sodden
hopelessness of the man's expression, the hopelessness of neurasthenia,
this baby, tied with a strip of gingham in his high chair, arrested and
held Stephen's attention. Very pallid, with the pallor not of flesh but
of an ivory image, with hair as thin and white as the hair of an old
man, and eyes that were as opaque as blue marbles, the baby sat there,
with its look of stoical philosophy and superhuman experience. And this
look said as plainly as if the tiny mute lips had opened and spoken
aloud: "I am tired before I begin. I am old before I begin. I am ending
before I begin."

Darrow knocked at the door, and the woman opened it with the coffee-pot
still in her hand.

"So you've come back," she said in a voice that was without surprise and
without gratitude.

"I came back to ask what you've done about a place. This gentleman is
with me. You don't mind his stepping inside a minute?"

"Oh, no, I don't mind. I don't mind anything." She drew back as she
answered, and the two men entered the room and stood gazing at the stove
with the look of embarrassment which the sight of poverty brings to the
faces of the well-to-do.

"When are you moving?" asked Darrow, withdrawing his gaze from the
glimmer of the embers in the stove, and fixing it on the steam that
issued from the coffee-pot.

"In the morning. We've found a cheaper place, though with rent going up
every week, it looks as if we'd soon have nowhere worse to move to,
unless it's gaol alley." Her tone dripped bitterness, and the lines of
her pale lips settled into an expression of scornful resignation.

Without replying to her words, Darrow nodded in the direction of the
young man, who had never looked up, but sat in the same rigid attitude,
with his vacant eyes staring at the hole in the carpet.

"Any better?"

"How can he be better," returned the woman grimly, "when all he does is
to walk the streets until he's fit to drop, and then drag himself home
and sit there like that for hours, too worn out even to lift his eyes
from the floor. This is the last coffee I've got. I've been saving it
since Christmas, but I made it for him because he seems more down than
usual to-night." Then a nervous spasm shook her thin figure, and she
add