“You never forget anything?”

“Forget?” he laughed shortly.  “When you find a thing I forget, it’ll be so small you’ll have to put on spectacles to recognize it!”

She nodded comprehendingly.  “And after that?”

“After that they caught me and sent me to school, and I learned to read and write and do sums—­I always had a wonderful head for figures—­but after school I went on selling papers so I’d have something to eat—–­”

The door burst open, and Archibald rushed in to show the evening clothes Gabriella had brought him from Paris.

“They are jolly, mother!  May I keep them on?”

“If you like, dear, but they’ll have to be altered a little.  The coat doesn’t quite fit across the shoulders.”

“You’re a dandy, kid, a regular dandy,” observed O’Hara, with humorous gravity.

After a few moments Archibald rushed off again, and Gabriella made an uncertain movement to follow him.  “I must go,” she said, without rising, and added abruptly:  “So you got on in spite of everything?”

“Right you are!” He leaned back in his chair and regarded her with benevolent optimism.  “You can always get on if the stuff is in you.  I meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn’t have kept me back.  It’s the gospel truth that I believe I came into the world meaning to get out of that cellar, and it was the same thing with areas and ash-bins.  I knew all the time I wasn’t going to keep grubbing a living out of an ash-bin.  I was always growing, shooting up like one of those mullein stalks out there, and eating?  Great Scott!  I used to eat so much when I was a kid that mother starved herself near to death so as to give me a square meal.  By the time I was twelve I had grown so fast that I got a job at cleaning the streets—­my first job from the city.  But I never went hungry.  As far as I recollect I never went hungry except the time I beat my way out to Chicago—­”

Without moving, without lowering her eyes from his face, Gabriella listened, while she clasped and unclasped the hands in her lap.  There is a personality that compels attention, and she realized for the first time that O’Hara possessed it.  A new vision of life had opened suddenly before her, and she felt, with the illuminating intensity of a religious conversion, that the world she had been living in was merely a fiction.  In spite of her experience she had really known nothing of life.

“Yes, a lot of ’em went hungry, but I never did,” he resumed in a tone of frank congratulation.  “Sometimes, of course, I’d go without supper or breakfast, but that was nothing—­that was not being really hungry, you know.  I always managed, even when I was at school, to make enough to keep satisfied.  What I minded most,” he added musingly, “was not having a regular place to go home to at night, and that’s why I started that lodging-house.  When you’ve slept in holes and on benches, and under freight cars, and hidden away in machine shops, you know there’s nothing on God’s earth—­not a blessed thing—­that can take the place of a real sure enough bed with real sure enough sheets and pillow cases on it.”