“Couldn’t it be made in the store?  The girls could club together, and it would cost much less than your pies and candy.  The gas is always burning, and you could have a little water-boiler.”

“You don’t know much about stores to think that.  Why, Mr. Levy watches like a cat to see we don’t eat peanuts or candy:  we’re fined if he catches us.  I’ve a good mind to take board at the ‘Home,’ only I should hate to be bossed ’round, and you can’t get in very often, either, it’s so crowded.  But I don’t mind so much now, for you see”—­Katy’s pale cheeks grew pink—­“Jim and I don’t mean to wait long.  He has ten dollars a week, and we can manage on that.  He says he’s ’most poisoned with the stuff his boarding-house keeper gives him, and he wants me to keep house.  I just laugh.  That’s a servant-girl’s work:  ’tain’t mine.”

The old story.  I had seen “Jim,” and knew him as rather a sensible-looking young fellow for an East Side clerk in a cheap store.  What sort of future could lie before them?  What help could come from this untrained child, herself helpless and with too limited intelligence to understand what demand the new life made upon her? and could any way be found to open her eyes and make her desire better knowledge?

Busy with this always fresh problem, I had come to a side street leading to the market from which two or three small groceries draw their supplies, and stopped for a moment to look at the flabby, half-decayed vegetables, the coarse beef and measly-looking pork from which comes the sickly, heavy smell preceding positive putrefaction.

“Look away!  Get the sense of it all,” said a brisk voice behind me—­a voice I knew well as that of one who gave days, and often nights, to work in these very streets.  “Did you see that tall woman with the big basket and a face like a chimney-swallow?  She runs a boarding-house ’round on Madison street, and this is the stuff she feeds them on.  Poor wretch!  She has a drunken husband and three drinking sons.  She means well, would like to do better by her boarders, but there is rent and gas and wear and tear of all sorts, and she buys bob veal and stale fish and rotten vegetables and alum bread, trying to make the ends meet.  I’ve been there and tasted the messes that come to her table, and I would drink too if forced to live on them.  She’s got sense, a little—­enough not to fly in a rage when I told her the food was enough to make a drunkard of every man in the house.  ‘I can’t help it,’ she said, crying.  ’I’ve only just so much money, and the girl spoils most of what I do get.’—­’Cook yourself,’ I said.—­’I can’t,’ she answered:  ‘I don’t know any better than the girl.  I’ll do anything you say.’  I am not a cook:  I could not tell her anything.  ‘Go to cooking-school,’ I said:  ‘it’ll pay you.’—­’I’ve neither time nor money,’ she said; and there it ended.  What’s to be done?  I’ve just come round the market.  It is dinner-time, and I think every other man was eating pie.  The same money might have bought him a bowl of strong soup or a plate of savory and nourishing stew, if there had been anybody with sense enough to provide it.  Up and down, in and out, wherever I go, I see that cooks are the missionaries needed.  Come in here a moment.”