“It is about your little boy I’ve come to see you.”  I moved my chair as far as possible from the red-hot stove and opened my coat.  “He is too young to be at work.  He isn’t twelve, is he?”

The indignation I had felt on hearing of Jimmy’s bondage to a bench from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with an interval of an hour for lunch, was unaccountably disappearing.  With helplessness and incapacity I was not ordinarily patient, and Mrs. Gibbons was an excellent example of both.  Still—­“He isn’t twelve yet, is he?” I repeated.

Mrs. Gibbons pushed the little girl, who was trying to get out of the bed, back in it, and shifted the whimpering baby from one arm to the other.  For a moment she hesitated, looked at me uncertainly.

“No ’m, he ain’t but eleven, but I had to tell the mayor that signed the papers permitting of him to work, that he was twelve.  The law don’t let children work lessen they’re twelve, and only then if their mother is a widow and ’ain’t got nothing and nobody to do for her.  I don’t like to tell a story if I can help it, and them what don’t know nothing ’bout how things is can’t understand, and say we oughtn’t to do it.  They’d do it, too, ifen they had to.  After his father died I had to take Jimmy out of school and put him to work.  There wasn’t nothing else to do.”

“Has his father been dead long?” I moved still further from the stove.  My question was unthinking.  He couldn’t have been dead long.

“In days and months it ’ain’t been so long, but it’s been awful long to me.  ’Taint been more’n a year since they brought him home to me dead, and I been plum’ no ’count ever since.  This baby,” she put the child in her arms on her lap and shook her knees in mechanical effort to still its cries, “this baby was born while its father was being buried, and when I took in my man was gone and wouldn’t never come home no more, never give me his wages on Saturday nights, and wouldn’t be here to do nothing for me and the children, seems like something inside me just give out.  I reckon you ’ain’t never had nothing to happen to you like that, have you?”

“No, I’ve never had anything like that to happen to me.”  The last remnant of indignation was vanishing.  That is, against the helpless, incapable, worn-out woman who was Jimmy’s mother.  Against something else, something I could not place or define or call by name, it was rising stormily.  “I know you need Jimmy’s help,” I said, after a moment, “but he is too young to work, too small.”

“Came near not getting a job ’count of not being no bigger.”

His mouth filled with half a biscuit, the boy nodded at me gleefully, then putting down his spoon, he dusted his hands and wiped them on the side of his trousers.  “The first place mother and me went to, they wouldn’t take me ’cause the table where I’d had to work struck me right here.”  His hands swiped his throat just under his chin.  “But the next place was all right.  They had a boys’ table and the bench was made high on purpose.”