At Third Avenue she boarded a down-town street-car, a bit winded from the dive across cobbles, but smiling.  Within, and after a preliminary method of paying fare new and confusing to her, she sat back against the rattly sides, her feet just lifted off the floor.  She could hardly keep back the ejaculations as old streets and old memories swam into view.

“Look at the old lay-dee talking to her-sel-uph,” sang an urchin across the aisle.

“Shut up,” said the mother, slapping him sidewise.

At one of the most terrific of these down-town streets Mrs. Meyerburg descended.  Beneath the clang and bang of the Elevated she stood confused for the moment and then, with her sure stride regained, swung farther eastward.

Slitlike streets flowed with holiday copiousness, whole families abroad on foot—­mothers swayback with babies, and older children who ran ahead shouting and jostling.  Houses lean and evil-looking marched shoulder to shoulder for blocks, no gaps except intersecting streets.  Fire-escapes ran zigzag down the meanest of them.  Women shouted their neighborhood jargon from windows flung momentarily open.  Poverty scuttled along close to the scant shelter of these houses.  An old man, with a beard to his chest, paused in a doorway to cough, and it was like the gripe-gripe of a saw with its teeth in hard wood.  A woman sold apples from a stoop, the form of a child showing through her shawl.  Yet Mrs. Meyerburg smiled as she hurried.

Midway in one of these blocks and without a pretense of hesitancy she turned into a black mouth of an entrance and up two flights.  On each landing she paused more for tears than for breath.  At a rear door leading off the second landing she knocked softly, but with insistence.  It opened to a slight crack, then immediately swung back full span.

“Gott in Himmel, Mrs. Meyerburg!  Mrs. Meyerburg! Kommen Sie herein.  Mrs. Meyerburg, for why you didn’t let me know?  To think not one of my children home and to-day a holiday, my place not in order—­”

“Now, now, Mrs. Fischlowitz, just so soon you go to one little bit of trouble, right away I got no more pleasure.  Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz.  Ach, if you ’ain’t got on your pantry shelfs just the same paper edge like my Roody used to cut out for me.”

“Come, come, Mrs. Meyerburg, in parlor where—­”

“Go way mit you.  Ain’t the kitchen where I spent seventeen years, the best years in my life, good enough yet?  Parlor yet she wants to take me.”

An immediate negligee of manner enveloped her like an old wrapper.  A certain tulle of bewilderment had fallen.  She was bold, even dictatorial.

“Don’t fuss round me so much, Mrs. Fischlowitz.  Just like old times I want it should seem.  Like maybe I just dropped in on you a lump of butter to borrow.  No, no, don’t I know where to hang mine own bonnet in mine own house?  Ach, the same coat nails what he drove in himself!”