“What’s the matter, lamb?” I says.
“Beg pad’, ma’am, he’s likely waitin’ to beg,” says the chauf—— that word. “I’d go right by if I was you.”
But the little fellow’d woke up and looked up.
“I can’t find the place,” he says, and stuck out his big box. The man looked at the label. “They ain’t no such number in this street,” says he. “It’s a mistake.”
The little fellow kind of begun to cry, and the wind was blowing up real bitter. I made out that him and his family made toys for the uptown shops, and somebody in our neighborhood had ordered some direct, and he was afraid to go home without the money. I didn’t have any money to give him, but I says to the chauf——
“Ask him where he lives, will you? And see if we’d have time to take him home before Mis’ Winthrop’s train gets in.”
The chauf—— done it, some like a prime minister, and he says, cold, he thought we’d have time, and I put the baby in the car. He was a real sweet little fellow, about seven. He told me his part in making the toys, and his mother’s, and his two little sisters’, and I give him the rest o’ my lunch, and he knew how to laugh when he got the chance, and we had a real happy time of it. And we come to his home.
Never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget the looks of that back upstairs place he called home, nor the smell of it—the smell of it. The waxy woman that was his mother, in a red waist, and with a big weight of hair, had forgot how to look surprised—that struck me as so awful—she’d forgot how to look surprised, just the same as a grand lady that’s learned not to; and there was the stumpy man that grunted for short instead of bothering with words; and the two little girls that might of been anybody’s—if they’d been clean—one of ’em with regular portrait hair. I stayed a minute, and give ’em the cost of about one griddle of my cook-stove, and then I went to the station to meet Aunt Ellis. And I poured it all out to her, as soon as she’d give me her cheek to kiss.
“So you haven’t had any tea!” she said, getting in the automobile. “I’m sorry you’ve been so annoyed the first thing.”
“Annoyed!” I says over. “Annoyed! Well, yes,” I says, “poor people is real annoying. I wonder we have ’em.”