Had it not been for the seventeen hundred dollars and the five per cent interest upon it, she could have earned enough to keep herself and her son very comfortable in the three rooms they occupied on Seventh Street.  But this debt, ever present in the minds of both mother and son, hung over them like a cloud and took every penny there was to spare.  Those two years from fifteen to seventeen were the most terrible in Raymond’s life.  At an age when he possessed neither philosophy nor knowledge and yet the fullest capacity to suffer, he had to bear, with what courage he could muster, the crudest buffets of an adverse fate.

Raymond drudged at his books, passed from class to class and returned at night to the empty rooms he called home, where he cooked his own meals and sat solitary beside the candle until it was the hour for bed.  His mother was seldom there to greet him.  As a nurse she was kept prisoner, for weeks at a time, in the houses where she was engaged.  It meant much to the boy to find a note from her lying on the table when he returned at night; more still to wait at street corners in his shabby overcoat for those appointments she often made with him.  When she took infectious cases and dared neither write nor speak to him, they had an hour planned beforehand when she would smile at him from an open window and wave her hand.

But she was not invariably busy.  There were intervals between her engagements when she remained at home; when those rooms, ordinarily so lonely and still, took on a wonderful brightness with her presence; when Raymond, coming back from school late in the afternoon, ran along the streets singing, as he thought of his mother awaiting him.  This stern woman, the harsh daughter of a harsh race, had but a single streak of tenderness in her withered heart.  To her son she gave transcendent love, and the whole of her starved nature went out to him in immeasurable devotion.  Their poverty, the absence of all friends, the burden of debt, the unacknowledged disgrace, and (harder still to bear) the long and enforced separations from each other, all served to draw the pair into the closest intimacy.  Raymond grew towards manhood without ever having met a girl of his own age; without ever having had a chum; without knowing the least thing of youth save much of its green-sickness and longing.

When the great debt had been paid off and the last of the notes cancelled there came no corresponding alleviation of their straitened circumstances.  Raymond had graduated from the High School and was taking the medical course at Columbia University.  Every penny was put by for the unavoidable expenses of his tuition.  The mother, shrewd, ambitious, and far-seeing, was staking everything against the future, and was wise enough to sacrifice the present in order to launch her son into a profession.  In those days fresh air had not been discovered.  Athletics, then in their infancy, were regarded much as we now do prize-fighting.  The ideal student