The mother sat blinking at them.  She delivered reproaches, swallowed potatoes and drank from a yellow-brown bottle.  After a time her mood changed and she wept as she carried little Tommie into another room and laid him to sleep with his fists doubled in an old quilt of faded red and green grandeur.  Then she came and moaned by the stove.  She rocked to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably to the two children about their “poor mother” and “yer fader, damn ’is soul.”

The little girl plodded between the table and the chair with a dish-pan on it.  She tottered on her small legs beneath burdens of dishes.

Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds.  He cast furtive glances at his mother.  His practised eye perceived her gradually emerge from a muddled mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken heat.  He sat breathless.

Maggie broke a plate.

The mother started to her feet as if propelled.

“Good Gawd,” she howled.  Her eyes glittered on her child with sudden hatred.  The fervent red of her face turned almost to purple.  The little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.

He floundered about in darkness until he found the stairs.  He stumbled, panic-stricken, to the next floor.  An old woman opened a door.  A light behind her threw a flare on the urchin’s quivering face.

“Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time?  Is yer fader beatin’ yer mudder, or yer mudder beatin’ yer fader?”

Chapter III

Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall.  Above the muffled roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering.

The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at will, an expression of great virtue.  She possessed a small music-box capable of one tune, and a collection of “God bless yehs” pitched in assorted keys of fervency.  Each day she took a position upon the stones of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol.  She received daily a small sum in pennies.  It was contributed, for the most part, by persons who did not make their homes in that vicinity.

Once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk, the gnarled woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with great dexterity beneath her cloak.  When she was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism, had almost kicked the stomach out of a huge policeman whose conduct upon that occasion she referred to when she said:  “The police, damn ’em.”