He looked down on the floor, and spoke in a whisper:
"And … would you send me off, too? The new war?"
She could scarcely speak.
"Whereto?"
"I … oh, I'll have to go down in a tenement somewhere—the slums…."
"Well, then," she said, quietly, "I'll go with you."
"But you—" he exclaimed, almost adding, "an old woman"—"it's impossible, mother."
She answered him with the same quietness.
"You forget the shanty."
And then it was clear to him. Like an electric bolt it shot him, thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She would go with him; more than that, she should. It was her right, won by years of actual want and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale, meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in its miraculousness.