"If you'll come in and set a minute, I'll tell you about them. I've got asthmy, and there's an awful draught comes up those steps."
Hagar sat down in an orange plush rocking-chair and the stout woman, having removed her apron, took the green and purple sofa.
"There now! I meant to mend that carpet!"—and she covered the hole with the sole of her shoe. "I am as fond as I can be of the Greens! Jim's a good man, and if Marietta wa'n't so delicate she'd manage better. The children are nice youngsters, too.... Well, I'm sorry they've gone, but Jim hurt his arm down in the Works and Marietta couldn't seem to get strong again after the last baby, and everybody's cutting wages when they ain't turning men off short, and Jim's turn come, for all he's always been good and sober and a good workman. First the Works hurt his arm, and then it said that he wasn't so useful now; and then it said that it had seen for a long time that it would have to economize, and the men could choose between cut wages or no wages at all, and Jim was one of them it said it to. So he had to take the cut." She began to cough and wheeze and then to pant for breath. "Did you—ever have—the asthmy? I'm—going off—with it—some day. Glass of water? Yes—next room—cup by the sink.... Thank you—child! You're real helpful.—What was I saying? Oh, yes—'t was Jim and Marietta and the children and Thomasine who had to economize."
"Where are they gone?" asked Hagar sorrowfully.
"It isn't so awful far from here. I'll give you the address. The car at the corner'll take you there pretty quick. But it ain't nowhere near so nice a neighbourhood or a house as this." She regarded her plush furniture and Nottingham curtains with pride. "Thomasine's an awful nice girl."
"Yes," said Hagar. The tears came into her eyes. "I love Thomasine. I oughtn't to have waited so long before coming to find her, but I never thought of all this. It never entered my head."
"She's got an awful good place, for a woman—nine dollars a week. She could have kept a room here, but she's awful fond of Jim and Marietta and the children, and she went with them. I reckon she'll help right sharp this winter—'less'n the stores take to cutting too."
On the street-car, the new address in her hand, Hagar considered Poverty. It was there in person to illustrate, in an opposite row of anæmic, anxious faces and forms none too warmly clad; it was there on the street, going up and down; it was there in the houses that were so gaunt, defaced, and ugly. The very November air, cold and querulous, seemed poor. Her mind was sorting and comparing impressions. She had known, when she came to think of it, a good deal of poverty, and a number of poor people. In the first place, she had been brought up on the tradition of the poverty after the war—but that had been heroic, exalted poverty, in which all shared, and where they kept the amenities. Then, when that had passed, there were the steadygoing poor people in the country—those who had always been poor and apparently always would be so. But it did not seem to hurt so in the country, and certainly it was not so ugly. Often it was not ugly at all. Of course, everybody at home, in a cheerful tone of voice, called the Greens poor people. The Greens were poor,—Car'line and Isham were poor;—she remembered, with a curious vividness, the poor woman on the canal boat, the summer her mother died. She had even heard the Colonel say that he—the Colonel—was poor. Of course, she had seen hosts of poor people. And yet until to-day, or rather, to be more precise, until the morning of the ferry and the Elevated, she had never generalized Poverty, never conceived it abstractly. Poverty! What was Poverty? Why was Poverty? Was it a constant; was it going to last? If so, why? If it wasn't going to last, what was going to make things better? It was desirable that things should be better—oh, desirable, desirable! The slave of Beauty and the slave of Righteousness in Hagar's soul rose together and looked upon the dump-heap and the shards that were thrown upon it. "It shouldn't be. There is no need and no sense—"
Four or five summers past, visiting with Miss Serena some Coltsworth or Ashendyne house in the country, and exploring, as she always did almost at once, the bookcases, she had come upon—tucked away in the extreme shadow of a shadowy shelf—a copy of William Morris's "News From Nowhere." Hagar had long since come to the conviction that her taste was radically different from that of most Coltsworths and Ashendynes. Where they tucked away, she drew forth. She had read "News From Nowhere" upon that visit. But she had read it hurriedly, amid distractions, and she was much younger then than now. It had left with her chiefly an impression of a certain kind of haunting, other-world beauty. She remembered the boy and the girl in the tobacco-shop, playing merchant, and the cherry trees in the streets, and the cottage of Ellen, and Ellen herself, and the Harvest Home. Why it was written or what it was trying to show, she had not felt then with any clearness. Now, somehow, the book came back to her. "That was what 'News from Nowhere' was trying to show. That people might work, work well and enough, and yet there be for all beauty and comfort and leisure and friendliness.... I'll see if I can find that book and I'll read it again."
The car stopped at the street-corner indicated. When she was out upon the pavement, and again stood a moment to look about her, she was frightened. This was the region of the fire-escapes, zig-zagging down the faces of the buildings, the ramshackle buildings. It was the region of the black windows, and the women leaning out, and the wan children. This street was narrower than the other, grimier and more untidy, more crowded, colder, and the voice of it never died. It rose to a clamour, it sank to a murmur, but it never vanished. Usually it kept a strident midway, idle and fretful as the interminable blown litter of the street. Hagar drew a pained breath. "Thomasine's got no business living here—nor Jim and Marietta and the children either!"