She felt strangely excited, but answered guardedly.

“It isn’t so bad, Joe....  There are a few decent people ... there’s Miss Gardiner, the librarian ... and I have books and sewing.”

“Oh, I know,” he went on, clumsily, “but you’re alone a lot.”

“Yes, I am,” she said, and all at once she felt that she could speak no further with him.  She began sewing diligently.

“Say, mother!”

No answer.

“Mother!”

“Yes,” dimly.

His voice sounded unnatural.

“Since the ... fire ...  I’ve been doing some thinking, some reading....”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been going about ... studying the city....”

“Yes.”

“Now I want you to understand, mother....  I want to tell you of ...  It’s—­well, I want to do something with my money, my life....”  And his voice broke, in spite of himself.

His mother felt as if she were smothering.  But she waited, and he went on: 

“For those dead girls, mother....” and sharply came a dry sob.  “And for all the toilers.  Oh, but can you understand?”

There was a silence.  Then she looked at him from her youthful, brilliant eyes, and saw only an overgrown, rather ignorant boy.  This gave her strength, and, though it was painful, she began speaking: 

“Understand?  Do you mean the books you are reading?”

“Yes,” he murmured.

“Well,” she smiled weakly, “I’ve been reading them, too.”

“You!” He was shocked.  He looked at her as if she had revealed a new woman to him.

“Yes,” she said, quickly.  “I found them in your room.”

He was amazedly silent.  He felt then that he had never really known his mother.

“Joe,” she said, tremulously, “I want to tell you a little about the war....  There are things I haven’t told you.”

And while he sat, stupefied and dumfounded, she told him—­not all, but many things.  She was back in the Boston of the sixties, when she was a young girl, when that town was the literary center of America, when high literature was in the air, when the poets had great fame and every one, even the business man, was a poet.  She had seen or met some of the great men.  Once Whittier was pointed out to her, at a time when his lines on slavery were burning in her brain.  She had seen the clear-eyed Lowell walking under the elms of Cambridge, and she justly felt that she was one of those

            “Who dare to be
  In the right with two or three.”

Once, even, a relative of hers, a writer then well known and now forgotten, had taken her out to see “the white Mr. Longfellow.”  It was one of the dream-days of her life—­the large, spacious, square Colonial house where once Washington had lived; the poet’s square room with its round table and its high standing desk in which he sometimes wrote; the sloping lawn; the great trees; and, better than anything, the simple, white-haired, white-bearded poet who took her hand so warmly and spoke so winningly and simply.  He even gave her a scrap of paper on which were written some of his anti-slavery lines.