h, and as a boy who was scarcely done
growing had no way of modifying his passion for nourishment, it would
be a lapse from decency to insult him on so legitimate a failing.

Mrs. Cafferty thought that this might be done, and thanked her friend
for the counsel; but Mary, listening to these political matters,
conceived Mrs. Cafferty as a person who had no longer any claim to
honor, and she pitied the young man whose appetite was thus publicly
canvassed, and who might at any moment be turned out of house and home
on account of a hunger against which he had no safeguard and no remedy.

XXVII

It was not long until Mary and Mrs. Cafferty's lodger met. As he came
in by the hall door one day Mary was carrying upstairs a large water
bucket, the portage of which two or three times a day is so heavy a
strain on the dweller in tenements. The youth instantly seized the
bucket and, despite her protestations and appeals, he carried it
upstairs. He walked a few steps in advance of Mary, whistling
cheerfully as he went, so she was able to get a good view of him. He
was so thin that he nearly made her laugh, but he carried the bucket,
the weight of which she had often bowed under, with an ease
astonishing in so slight a man, and there was a spring in his walk
which was pleasant to see. He laid the bucket down outside her room,
and requested her urgently to knock at his door whenever she required
more water fetched, because he would be only too delighted to do it
for her, and it was not the slightest trouble in the world. While he
spoke he was stealing glances at her face and Mary was stealing
glances at his face, and when they caught one another doing this at
the same moment they both looked hurriedly away, and the young man
departed to his own place.

But Mary was very angry with this young man. She had gone downstairs
in her house attire, which was not resplendent, and she objected to
being discovered by any youth in raiment not suitable to such an
occasion. She could not visualize herself speaking to a man unless she
was adorned as for a festivity. The gentlemen and ladies of whom her
mother sometimes spoke, and of whom she had often dreamt, were never
mean in their habiliments. The gentlemen frequently had green silken
jackets with a foam of lace at the wrists and a cascade of the same
rich material brawling upon their breasts, and the ladies were
attired in a magnificent scarcity of clothing, the fundamental
principle