"It's too cold for that thin suit of yours, I wouldn't wonder."
"I'm not cold in the least. Perhaps I have a lot of warmth stored up in me; but I promise if it gives out to buy a new coat."
"Like that, now." A young girl passed them clad in brilliant scarlet. Her face was painted to match her coat; her hat was the latest extravagance in fashion, immensely brimmed, with a feather that, extending beyond the broad wake of black velvet, swept against Kathleen's cheek as she passed. "The dirty style!" Kathleen said indignantly. "Who knows what germs she hands out every day. The city government ought to forbid the wearing of them feather dusters; at any rate, on public highways."
Hertha smiled and presently slipped back into her thoughts, recalling the story she had just seen and going on with it, which was a way she had; but Kathleen watched the people. The men strolled along, all alike in derby hats and readymade clothes; while the women took little steps in high-heeled shoes, and talked shrilly, striving to be heard above the city's tumult. They used the slovenly street vernacular which scores of nationalities have helped to produce, contributing nothing from their own wealth of speech but changing consonants, slurring vowels, making at length of the beautiful English tongue an ugly, degraded thing. "Aw, I say, gimme dat!"
Kathleen prided herself upon her speech. She was born in Ireland, though she had little recollection of the fact, having arrived at the port of New York while taking nourishment at the maternal fount. "And it was you was screaming and beating me with your little fists, mavourneen," her mother used to say, "when I was making shift to button up my dress decently and carry you down the gangplank." She kept something of the richness of the Irish speech that had surrounded her in her childhood, despising the slang that with many an emigrant takes the place of a language. She might make a slip in grammar, but she never wittingly misused a word. Hertha's ladylike talk with its soft accent was a delight, and a little warm wave of pride swept over her as she looked at the girl walking by her side and remembered that she had chosen to come to her home.
"Just here to the left a step, dear," she said, "and we'll be out of the cold."
The air within the large, ill-ventilated hall could also be tasted, but no one could truthfully describe it as cold and fresh. It took the vitality out of Hertha, leaving her both tired and sleepy; but to Kathleen it was the breath of a new life. Moving amongst her fellows, nodding here, whispering a friendly "Good evening, comrade," there, she found the seats that she wanted, and, leaning well forward in her chair, gave herself to the discussion.
The address of the evening was over, but the speaker, a small man, ill shaven, with a sallow skin and sharp features, was answering questions. To Hertha he was a familiar and an unpleasant type of rural southern white, and she paid him little attention, slipping back into her dream story which had already reached the point where the beautiful and still young looking couple were being presented with sturdy grandchildren. To the audience, however, the meeting was growing in interest. Some one from the floor was casting doubt upon the picture the southerner had presented, suggesting that poverty in the country, in a warm climate, could not equal the severity of poverty in a northern slum.
As the speaker rose to reply his eyes shone with excitement. "Have I exaggerated the suffering of the country?" he asked. "Let me tell you of just one tenant farmer, and, remember, there are hundreds of thousands like him. He's a decent man, uneducated, but kindly, who, when I saw him, had a wife and ten children; the oldest was fifteen. There wasn't one of them that was clothed, not really clothed. One had a coat, another a shirt, two out of the ten had shoes. The girls went in rags, folks' left-over clothes that had been worn out years ago. But it was the woman who was the pitifullest. She looked like she had never had an hour's rest since she was grown, and I reckon she hadn't. It was the business of the landlord to keep her busy. She had to have children to help work the place, and she had to work herself to keep from being turned out of house and home. There was a baby dragging at her skirt, and it was put the one down on the bed and set the other to watch it, while she went into the fields. Her face was so thin her eyes stood out like a bird's, and her cheek was the color of an old shuck of corn. I haven't seen an old man or an old woman in this city walk with the weariness that she walked out from her broken down cabin to make her crops.
"At noon there was nothing to eat in the place, but in the evening the man went down to the store and came back with a bit of cornmeal and a few slices of bacon. The children fell upon it like starving dogs. Perhaps the woman got some, but I didn't see her.