Billy McMahan was happy.

He had shaken the hand of Cortlandt Van Duyckink.

* * * * * * *

The big pale-gray auto with its shining metal work looked out of place moving slowly among the push carts and trash-heaps on the lower east side.  So did Cortlandt Van Duyckink, with his aristocratic face and white, thin hands, as he steered carefully between the groups of ragged, scurrying youngsters in the streets.  And so did Miss Constance Schuyler, with her dim, ascetic beauty, seated at his side.

“Oh, Cortlandt,” she breathed, “isn’t it sad that human beings have to live in such wretchedness and poverty?  And you—­how noble it is of you to think of them, to give your time and money to improve their condition!”

Van Duyckink turned his solemn eyes upon her.

“It is little,” he said, sadly, “that I can do.  The question is a large one, and belongs to society.  But even individual effort is not thrown away.  Look, Constance!  On this street I have arranged to build soup kitchens, where no one who is hungry will be turned away.  And down this other street are the old buildings that I shall cause to be torn down and there erect others in place of those death-traps of fire and disease.”

Down Delancey slowly crept the pale-gray auto.  Away from it toddled coveys of wondering, tangle-haired, barefooted, unwashed children.  It stopped before a crazy brick structure, foul and awry.

Van Duyckink alighted to examine at a better perspective one of the leaning walls.  Down the steps of the building came a young man who seemed to epitomize its degradation, squalor and infelicity—­a narrow-chested, pale, unsavory young man, puffing at a cigarette.

Obeying a sudden impulse, Van Duyckink stepped out and warmly grasped the hand of what seemed to him a living rebuke.

“I want to know you people,” he said, sincerely.  “I am going to help you as much as I can.  We shall be friends.”

As the auto crept carefully away Cortlandt Van Duyckink felt an unaccustomed glow about his heart.  He was near to being a happy man.

He had shaken the hand of Ikey Snigglefritz.

THE PURPLE DRESS

We are to consider the shade known as purple.  It is a color justly in repute among the sons and daughters of man.  Emperors claim it for their especial dye.  Good fellows everywhere seek to bring their noses to the genial hue that follows the commingling of the red and blue.  We say of princes that they are born to the purple; and no doubt they are, for the colic tinges their faces with the royal tint equally with the snub-nosed countenance of a woodchopper’s brat.  All women love it—­when it is the fashion.

And now purple is being worn.  You notice it on the streets.  Of course other colors are quite stylish as well—­in fact, I saw a lovely thing the other day in olive green albatross, with a triple-lapped flounce skirt trimmed with insert squares of silk, and a draped fichu of lace opening over a shirred vest and double puff sleeves with a lace band holding two gathered frills—­but you see lots of purple too.  Oh, yes, you do; just take a walk down Twenty-third street any afternoon.