“Any better?”

“How can he be better,” returned the woman grimly, “when all he does is to walk the streets until he’s fit to drop, and then drag himself home and sit there like that for hours, too worn out even to lift his eyes from the floor.  This is the last coffee I’ve got.  I’ve been saving it since Christmas, but I made it for him because he seems more down than usual to-night.”  Then a nervous spasm shook her thin figure, and she added in a fierce whisper:  “He’s sick, that’s the matter with him.  He ain’t sick enough to be in a government hospital, but he’d be better off if he was.  Even when he gets work he ain’t able to stick to it.  The folks that hire him don’t have any patience.  As long as he was over yonder in France it looked as if every woman in America was knitting for him; and now since he’s back here he can’t get a job to keep him and the children alive.”

“How have you fed the children?”

“On what I could get cheapest.  You see how sickly and peaked they look, and it’s been awful damp in these rooms sometimes.  The doctor says he ain’t sick; it ain’t his body, it’s his mind.  He says he’s had a kind of horror inside of him ever since he came home.  He’s turned against everything he used to do, and even everything he used to believe in.”

“That’s hell!” exclaimed Stephen suddenly; and at her surprised glance, he added, “I’ve been there and I know.  Nerves, they say, but just as real as your skin.”  He looked away from her to the man on the sofa.  “To have that, and be in poverty!” Turning away from the father, his glance met the calm eyes of the baby fixed on him with that gaze which was as old and as pitiless as philosophy.

“Ma, may I help myself?” screamed one of the children, drumming loudly on the table.  “I’d rather have bread and molasses!” cried another; and “Oh, Ma, when we move to-morrow will you let me take the kitten I found?”

“Well, I’ve talked to the Governor,” said Darrow, in his level voice which sounded to Stephen so unemotional, “and I think we can find a job for your husband.”

Suddenly the man on the sofa looked up.  “I voted against him,” he whispered angrily.

Darrow laughed shortly.  “You don’t know the Governor if you think he’d hold that against you,” he replied.  “But for that little weakness of his he might not be a political problem.”

“That’s the way he goes on,” remarked the woman despairingly.  “Always saying things straight out that other people would keep back.  He don’t care what happens, that’s the whole truth of it.  He don’t care about anything on earth, not even his tobacco.”

“Life!” thought Stephen, with a dull pain in his heart.  “That’s what life is!” And the old familiar feeling of suffocation, of distaste for everything that he had ever felt or thought or believed, smothered him with the dryness of dust.  Going quickly over to the sofa, he laid his hand on the man’s shoulder, and spoke in a high ringing voice which he tried to make cheerful.  “It will pass, old fellow,” he said, and could have laughed aloud at the insincerity of his tone.  “I know because I’ve been there.”  And he added cynically, as a kind of sacrifice on the altar of truth:  “Everything will pass if you only wait long enough.”