Joe spoke awkwardly.
"So we're here, mother … and it's ripping, isn't it?"
She could hardly speak, but her eyes seemed to sparkle with a second youth.
"Yes," she murmured, "it's the first time we've had anything like this since you were a boy."
They both thought of his father, and the vanished days of the shanty on the hillside, and his mother thought:
"People must live out their own lives in their own homes."
There was something that fed the roots of her woman-nature to have this place apart, this quiet shelter where she ruled. It would be a joy to go marketing, it would be a delight to cook, and it was charming to live so intimately with her son. They were a family again.
After supper they washed the dishes together, laughing and chatting. There were a hundred pleasing details to consider—where to place furniture, what to buy, whether to have a servant or not (Joe insisted on one), and all the incidents of the day to go over.
And then after the dish-washing they stopped work, and sat down in the front office amid the packing-cases and the trunks and the litter and débris. The gas was lighted above them, and the old-fashioned stove which stood in the center and sprouted up a pipe nearly to the ceiling and then at right angles into the wall was made red-hot with wood and coal. Joe smoked and his mother sewed, and a hush seemed to fall on the city, broken only by the echo of passing footsteps and the mellowed thunder of the intermittent trolley-cars.
"And they call this a slum," muttered Joe.