“The sounds come out through a big door in a high buildin’ and I went in to see the fun. Thinks I, I’ll get a small slice of this here Tenderloin anyhow. Well, I went in, and that’s where I dropped the dollar. They came around and collected it.”
“What was inside. Bill?” I asked.
“A fellow told me, when we come out,” said Bill, “it was a church, and one of these preachers that mixes up in politics was denouncin’ the evils of the Tenderloin.”
The Struggle of the Outliers
Again today, at a certain street, on the ragged boundaries of the city, Lawrence Holcombe stopped the trolley car and got off. Holcombe was a handsome, prosperous business man of forty; a man of high social standing and connections. His comfortable suburban residence was some five miles farther out on the car line from the street where so often of late he had dropped off the outgoing car. The conductor winked at a regular passenger, and nodded his head archly in the direction of Holcombe’s hurrying figure.
“Getting to be a regular thing,” commented the conductor.
Holcombe picked his way gingerly down a roughly graded side street infested with ragged urchins and impeded by abandoned tinware. He stopped at a small cottage fenced in with a patch of stony ground with a few stunted shade-trees growing about it. A stout, middle-aged woman was washing clothes in a tub at one side of the door. She looked around, and smiled a smile of fat recognition.
“Good avening, Mr. Holcombe, is it yerself ag’in? Ye’ll find Katie inside, sir.”
“Did you speak to her for me?” asked Holcombe, in a low voice; “did you try to help me gain her consent as you promised to do?”
“Sure, and I did that. But, sir, ye know gyurls will be gyurls. The more ye coax ’em the wilfuller they gets. ’Tis yer own pleadin’ that’ll get her if anything will. An’ I hopes ye may, for I tells her she’ll never get a betther offer than yours, sir. ’Tis a good girl she is, and a tidy hand for anything from the kitchen to the parlour, and she’s never a fault except, maybe, a bit too much likin’ for dances and ruffles and ribbons, but that’s natural to her age and good looks if I do say it meself, bein’ her mither, Mr. Holcombe. Ye can spake ag’in to Katie, sir, and maybe this time ye’ll have luck unless Danny Conlan, the wild gossoon, has been at it ag’in overpersuadin’ her ag’inst ye.”