here,
a pale, little woman who sat with her sewing in her lap, staring dully
out over the roofs below her. I had been detailed to go around among
these women and to make them as comfortable as I could. Hardly a one,
however, could understand English; and Frank's mother, when I came to
her, took no notice of anything that I said or mentioned. She looked at
me from under lowered eyebrows. Later on Mr. Richards, who had had her
under his attention for some months, told me how frightened she had been
by her son's misdemeanor--it had been no more than that, according to
the police report--and it was easy to imagine that she looked with
suspicion upon every comrade whom Frank followed, now. The fact that I
was so much older and was a member of the staff of the settlement
workers was not enough to overcome the whole of her distrust.

And when the evening came, and Frank and I had emerged from one of the
club meetings--for he was president of his particular club of boys of
his own age--hot and tired from wrangling over Robert's Rules of Order
and the wording of a baseball challenge to be sent to a rival
organization, he told me the entire story of that misdemeanor. He would
not speak of it readily. He too felt the shame of it, differently of
course, but no less heavily. He had been in bad company. He had been
going for months with some sons of one of the East Side's notorious
gamblers--boys who were wise beyond their years and brutal beyond their
strength. Cowardly, sneaky, they had prompted him to steal things at the
counters of all the shops on their street. He had never realized, under
their whispered urgings, how wrong it was--and he had never had a chance
to profit by his thefts himself. The petty business had gone on for a
couple of weeks, the other boys praising him, bullying him by turn, and
dividing the loot between them. And when the inevitable happened and
Frank found himself locked for the night in a police court, frantic at
the disgrace which the loathsome night exaggerated, these boys informed
against him.

When he told me of this, and how they had come snivelling before the
police lieutenant, and had lied to make that fat, gruff, old master
believe that Frank had stolen even more than he actually had, and all
for the sake of becoming the chief of their "gang"--then his narrow face
darkened and writhed with a hate that was too great for him to bear--and
presently tears came into his black eyes.

"Were they Jewi