“Aw!”

“Look at the papa—­slippers and all!  And the kid!  Look at the kid, Sweetness.”

Her confusion nearly choked her and her rapid breath clouded the window-glass.  “Yeh, Charley!  Looka the little kid!  Ain’t he cute?”

An Elevated train crashed over their heads, drowning out her words; but her smile, which flickered like light over her face, persisted and her arm crept back into his.  At each shop window they lingered, but the glow of the first one remained with her.

“Look, Sweetness—­’Red Swag, the Train King!  Performance going on now.’  Wanna go in?”

“Not to-night.  Let’s stay outside.”

“Anything your little heart de-sires.”

They bought hot chestnuts, city harbingers of autumn, from a vender, and let fall the hulls as they walked.  They drank strawberry ice-cream soda, pink with foam.  Her resuscitation was complete; his spirits did not wane.

“I gotta like a queen pretty much not to get sore at a busted evening like this.  It’s a good thing the ticket didn’t cost me nothing.”

“Ain’t it, though?”

“Look!  What’s in there—­a exhibit?”

They paused before a white-lighted store-front, and read, laboriously: 

    FREE TUBERCULOSIS EXHIBIT

    TO EDUCATE THE PEOPLE HOW TO PREVENT CONSUMPTION

“Oh!” She dragged at his arm.

“Aw, come on, Sweetness; nothing but a lot of T.B.’s.”

“Let’s—­let’s go in.  See, it’s free.  Looka! it’s all lit up and all; see, pictures and all.”

“Say, ain’t I enough of a dead one without dragging me in there?  Free!  I bet they pinch you for something before you get out.”

“Come on, Charley.  I never did see a place like this.”

“Aw, they’re all over town.”

He followed her in surlily enough and then, with a morbid interest, round a room hung with photographs of victims in various emaciated stages of the white plague.

“Oh!  Oh!  Ain’t it awful?  Ain’t it awful?  Read them symptoms.  Almost with nothing it—­it begins.  Night—­sweats and losing weight and coughing, and—­oh—­”

“Look!  Little kids and all!  Thin as matches.”

“Aw, see, a poor little shaver like that!  Look!  It says sleeping in that dirty room without a window gave it to him.  Ugh! that old man!  Self-indulgence and intemperance.’  Looka that girl in the tobacco—­factory.  Oh!  Oh!  Ain’t it awful!  Dirty shops and stores, it says; dirty saloons and dance-halls—­weak lungs can’t stand them.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Aw, look!  How pretty she is in this first picture; and look at her here—­nothing but a stack of bones on a stretcher.  Aw!  Aw!”

“Come on!”

“Courage is very important, it says.  Consumptives can be helped and many are cured.  Courage is—­”

“Come on; let’s get out of this dump.  Say, it’s a swell night for a funeral.”