Mrs. White undressed her child, giving it very good care.  It was a tiny creature, small-boned and meager.  Every time I looked over at it it smiled appealingly, touchingly.  Finally when she went downstairs to the pump to get a drink of water for it, I went over and in her absence stroked the little hand and arm:  such a small hand and such an infinitesimal arm!  Unused to attention and the touch, but not in the least frightened, Letty extended her miniature member and looked up at me in marvel.  Mrs. White on her return made herself ready for the night.  She said in her frail voice:  “Letty’s a powerful hand for vegetubbles, and she eats everything.”

Memory of the ham and the putrid fish I had seen this eighteen-months-old child devour not an hour ago came to my mind.

Mrs. White let down her hair—­a nonchalance that Molly had not been guilty of.  This woman’s hair was no more than a wisp.  It stood out thin, wiry, almost invisible in the semilight.  This was the extent of her toilet.  She slipped out of her shoes, but she did not even take off her dress.  Then she turned in by her child.  She was very ill; it was plain to be seen.  Death was fast upon this woman’s track; it should clutch her inevitably within the next few weeks at most, if that emaciated body had resistance for so long.  Her languor was slow and indicative, her gray, ashen face like death itself.

“Lie still, Letty,” she whispers to the baby; “don’t touch mother—­she can’t stand it to-night.”

My mattress was straw and billowy, the bed sheetless, and under the weight of the cotton comforter I tried to compose myself.  There were five of us in the little loft.  My bedfellow was peaceful and lay still, too tired to do anything else.  In front of me was the open window, through which shone the electric light, blatant and insistent; behind this, the clock of Excelsior—­brightly lit and incandescent—­glared in upon us, giant hands going round, seeming to threaten the hour of dawn and frightening sleep and mocking, bugbearing the short hours which the working-woman might claim for repose.

It was well on to nine o ’clock and the mills were working overtime.  Molly turned restlessly on her bed and murmured, “I suttenly dew feel bad to-night.”  A little later I heard her say over to herself:  “My, I forgot to say my prayers.”  She was the sole member of the loft to whom sleep came; it came to her soon.  I lay sleepless, watching the clock of Excelsior.  The ladder staircase openly led to the kitchen:  there was no door, no privacy possible to our quarters, and the house was full of men.

A little later Letty cries:  “A drink, a drink!” and the tone of the mother, who replies, is full of patience, but fuller still of suffering.