"Don't you understand, Auntie Martha? It's little Yetta come back to take care of you. You won't ever have to worry any more. I'll take care of you."
Tears came suddenly to the old woman, the first in a long, long time, and Yetta got her to bed. Two decidedly noisy young men lodged in the front room. Yetta was rather frightened; it took her a long time to fall asleep in the stuffy bedroom beside her aunt.
It was easy to reconstruct the process by which the Goldstein family had disintegrated. Isaac was in prison. Rosa had probably gone off to live by herself—tired of bringing home wages for her father to guzzle. She would be living alone in some dismal furnished room. She had been too poorly endowed by Nature to "go wrong."
But despite the squalor of the flat and the heavy air of the dark bedroom, Yetta woke up with a new and firmer grip on life. She had found some one who needed her. The first of the next month she moved her aunt to a flat nearer The Clarion office. There were four rooms and a bath. The parlor she rented to Moore and Levine. It was a great improvement for them, and Mrs. Goldstein's cooking was less expensive and more nourishing than the restaurant fare on which they had been subsisting. Yetta shared the bedroom with her aunt.
The metamorphosis in the old woman was startling. Yetta remembered her as a very unlovely person, hardened and bitter. It had been a reflection of her environment. Now in clean and decent surroundings, in the midst of those who treated her with respect, under the sunshine of her niece's affection, she changed completely. Yetta was continually surprised to find how much her aunt reminded her of her father.
The struggle in the office was as intense as ever, but now Yetta had a home. Her wounds were healing rapidly.
Some months after her new establishment had been founded, Yetta came into The Clarion office and found confusion. Every one talked at once, and it took some minutes to get a connected story. Isadore had caved in. For several days he had been rather surly—excusing himself on the ground of a headache. That morning about nine o'clock he had tumbled out of his chair, unconscious. Dr. Liebovitz—the Comrade whom Yetta had heard speak at her first labor-meeting—had been called in. He had pronounced it typhoid fever.
"We had him taken up to our room," Harry Moore said; "Levine and I will take his. It's no place for a sick man. And besides, when the nurse goes, your aunt can take care of him."'
A sort of helplessness had fallen on the little group, now that their leader was stricken. But Levine in this crisis changed his character—or let his true character shine through his crust of pessimism. He pushed every one back into their places and set the wheels going again.