Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a household.  He did not need to seek work.  From the time he was seventeen he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a stock boy.  Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo’s youth, a boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and responsibility of middle age.  In Hugo’s case the second was true.  From his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material values.  From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never attained her iron indomitability.

It had been a terrific struggle.  His salary at twenty-three was most modest, but he was getting on.  He intended to be a buyer, some day, and take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china houses.

The day after the funeral he said to his mother, “Well, now we’ve got to get Etta married.  But married well.  Somebody who’ll take care of her.”

“You’re a good son, Hugo,” Mrs. Handle had said.

Hugo shook his head.  “It isn’t that.  If she’s comfortable and happy—­or as happy as she knows how to be—­she’ll never come back.  That’s what I want.  There’s debts to pay, too.  But I guess we’ll get along.”

They did get along, but at snail’s pace.  There followed five years of economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate.  Etta, the acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the impetus of a dowry.  The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly, long-suffering, subdued—­and in need of a start.  He was.  They managed a very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash.  Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother.  Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband.  She had expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were right.  She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes.

The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons.  A new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle.

Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them a bond indissoluble.  Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a man of forty.  At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight, but he did not know that then.  His music lessons were his one protest against a beauty-starved youth.  He played rather surprisingly well the cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness) in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar smoke, happily.  His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say,