e a good sort. Miss Ida
was kind in her inquiries about my plans.

"Have you ever operated a power machine?" she asked.

"Yes," I responded--with what pride she little dreamed. "I've run an
electric Singer."

"I guess I can get you a job, then, all right, at my place. It's
piece-work; you get off at five, but you can make good money."

I thanked her, not adding that my Chicago career was to be a checkered
one, and that I was determined to see how many things I could do that I
had never done before.

But social life was beginning to wear on Miss Ida's intended. He took up
his hat and swung along toward the door. I was struggling to extract
with my fork the bones of a hard, fried fish. Mrs. Wood encouraged me in
a motherly tone:

"Oh, my, don't be so formal; take your knife."

"Say," called a voice from the door, "say, come on, Ida, I'm waiting for
you." And the blonde fiancee hurried away with an embarrassed laugh to
join her lover. She was refined and delicate, her ears were small, her
hands white and slender, she spoke correctly with a nasal voice, and her
teeth (as is not often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem
suddenly revealed when they open their mouths) were sound and clean.

The man's smooth face was all commonness and vulgarity.

"He's had appendicitis," Mrs. Wood explained when we were alone. "He's
been out of work a long time. As soon as he goes to his job his side
bursts out again where they operated on him. He ain't a bit strong."

"When are they going to be married?" I asked.

"Oh, dear me, they don't think of that yet; they're in no hurry."

"Will Miss Ida work after she's married?"

"No, indeed."

Did they not have their share of ideal then, these two young labourers
who could wait indefinitely, fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable
surroundings?

I returned to my tenement room; its one window opened over a narrow
alley flanked on its opposite side by a second tenement, through whose
shutters I could look and see repeated layers of squalid lodgings. The
thermometer had climbed up into the eighties. The wail of a newly born
baby came from the room under mine. The heat was stifling. Outdoors in
the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the
curb, on the sidewalk, on the house steps. The breath of the black,
sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it
blew across the stockyards. Shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of
old a