h other, utterly alone ... no boarding--house
flutter and gossip and noise, no unpleasant jarring personalities, no
wholesale cookery. All was quiet and peace--a brooding, tinkling
silence. They both smiled and smiled, their eyes moist, and the food
tasted so good. Blessed bread that they broke together, the cup that
they shared between them! The moment became sacred, human, stirred by
all the old, old miraculousness of home, that deepest need of humanity,
that rich relationship that cuts so much deeper than the light
touch-and-go of the world.

Joe spoke awkwardly.

"So we're here, mother ... and it's ripping, isn't it?"

She could hardly speak, but her eyes seemed to sparkle with a second
youth.

"Yes," she murmured, "it's the first time we've had anything like this
since you were a boy."

They both thought of his father, and the vanished days of the shanty on
the hillside, and his mother thought:

"People must live out their own lives in their own homes."

There was something that fed the roots of her woman-nature to have this
place apart, this quiet shelter where she ruled. It would be a joy to go
marketing, it would be a delight to cook, and it was charming to live so
intimately with her son. They were a family again.

After supper they washed the dishes together, laughing and chatting.
There were a hundred pleasing details to consider--where to place
furniture, what to buy, whether to have a servant or not (Joe insisted
on one), and all the incidents of the day to go over.

And then after the dish-washing they stopped work, and sat down in the
front office amid the packing-cases and the trunks and the litter and
debris. The gas was lighted above them, and the old-fashioned stove
which stood in the center and sprouted up a pipe nearly to the ceiling
and then at right angles into the wall was made red-hot with wood and
coal. Joe smoked and his mother sewed, and a hush seemed to fall on the
city, broken only by the echo of passing footsteps and the mellowed
thunder of the intermittent trolley-cars.

"And they call this a slum," muttered Joe.

In fact, save possibly for less clear air and in the summer a noise of
neighbors, they might have been living in New York's finest
neighborhood--almost a disappointment to two people prepared to plunge
into dirt, danger, and disease.... Later Joe learned that some of the
city's magazine writers had settled in the district on purpose, not
because they were meeting a