“If you’ll believe what I say,” she replied, in a voice which had gained the assurance of a heartfelt conviction, “I was just praying for help to come, but somehow it always seems to take one’s breath clean away when there’s an answer.  I’ve been trying to sell some of the little creatures,” she went on, “but they don’t go well to-day and I guess Jim won’t be able to hold out till I get the money for his funeral.”

“And Jim is your husband?” he asked quietly.

“I married him more than thirty years ago,” she answered, stooping to wipe her eyes with a hard rub on the sleeve of her jacket, “and he was always a good worker until this sickness came.  I’ve never known him to miss a day’s work so long as he had his health,” she added proudly, “and that, too, when so many other husbands were soaking themselves in drink.”

“And he’s ill now?” asked Adams, as she paused.

“He’s been dying steadily for a week, sir,” she answered with the simple directness of the grief which takes account only of the concrete fact, “and I’ve been working day and night to make up his burial money by the time he needs it.  If he’d only manage to last a day or two longer I might lay up enough to keep him out of the paupers’ lot,” she finished with a kind of awful cheerfulness.

It was this cheerfulness, he found, glimmering like some weird death-fire over the actual horror, which made his realisation of the tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the poverty which she described.  Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering—­and before it his own personal afflictions appeared as unsubstantial as shades.  At least he had had the empty dignity of receiving his sorrow with a full sense of its importance, but with this woman the very presence of grief was crowded out by the brutal obligation to meet the material demands of death.  Death, indeed, had become but an incident—­a side issue of the event—­and the funeral had usurped the place and the importance of a law of nature.

“Let me go home with you—­I should like it,” he said when they had started to walk on again; and then with an instinctive courtesy, he took the basket from her and slipped it over his own arm.  A little later, when following her directions, they entered a surface car for the West Side, he placed the basket on his knees and sat looking down at the small gray kittens that awaking suddenly began to play beneath his eyes.  The jostling crowd about him, the substantial panting figure of the woman beside him, and more than all the joyous animal movements of the kittens in his lap, seemed somehow to return to him that intimate relation to life which he had lost.  He no longer felt the sensation of detachment, of insecurity in his surroundings; for his own individual existence had become in his eyes but a part of the enlarged universal existence of the race.

As the car stopped the woman motioned to him with an imperative gesture, and then as they reached the sidewalk, she pointed to a fruiterer’s stand on the outside of a tenement near the corner.