ny's, your
corner bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.

Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid
case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her
twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of
our Lord.

She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all,
what are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater,
or greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least,
Gertie Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door
to her rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except
on Tuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And when she
left of mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box
of biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her
camisole in the top drawer there was no one to regret her.

There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for
whom one spark of home fire burning would light the world.

Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door
upon this or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart
how not to sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem
less like a damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.

The only picture--or call it atavism if you will--which adorned Miss
Slayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night
closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She
could visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for
the smell of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of
two high-back chairs and the wooden crib between.

What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine
bargain basement hours of hairpins and darning-balls to the downy
business of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's
slippers before the fire of imagination.

There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that
she had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and
in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her
vision begin to glow.

Of late years, or, more specifically, for two years and eight months,
another picture had invaded, even superseded the old. A stamp-photograph
likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback's mirror,
and thereafter No Man's slippers became number eight