... Her husband sat up in bed with his shirt pulled over
his head, and the doctor's finger drew a circle on his back.

"Now, if we were to cut him open here, Mrs. Parker," said the doctor,
"you'd find his lungs chock-a-block with white powder. Breathe, my
good fellow!" And Mrs. Parker never knew for certain whether she saw or
whether she fancied she saw a great fan of white dust come out of her
poor dead husband's lips...

But the struggle she'd had to bring up those six little children and
keep herself to herself. Terrible it had been! Then, just when they were
old enough to go to school her husband's sister came to stop with them
to help things along, and she hadn't been there more than two months
when she fell down a flight of steps and hurt her spine. And for five
years Ma Parker had another baby--and such a one for crying!--to look
after. Then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her;
the two boys emigrated, and young Jim went to India with the army, and
Ethel, the youngest, married a good-for-nothing little waiter who died
of ulcers the year little Lennie was born. And now little Lennie--my
grandson...

The piles of dirty cups, dirty dishes, were washed and dried. The
ink-black knives were cleaned with a piece of potato and finished off
with a piece of cork. The table was scrubbed, and the dresser and the
sink that had sardine tails swimming in it...

He'd never been a strong child--never from the first. He'd been one of
those fair babies that everybody took for a girl. Silvery fair curls he
had, blue eyes, and a little freckle like a diamond on one side of his
nose. The trouble she and Ethel had had to rear that child! The things
out of the newspapers they tried him with! Every Sunday morning Ethel
would read aloud while Ma Parker did her washing.

"Dear Sir,--Just a line to let you know my little Myrtil was laid out
for dead... After four bottils... gained 8 lbs. in 9 weeks, and is still
putting it on."

And then the egg-cup of ink would come off the dresser and the letter
would be written, and Ma would buy a postal order on her way to work
next morning. But it was no use. Nothing made little Lennie put it
on. Taking him to the cemetery, even, never gave him a colour; a nice
shake-up in the bus never improved his appetite.

But he was gran's boy from the first...

"Whose boy are you?" said old Ma Parker, straightening up from the stove
and going over to the smudgy window. And a little