I was half-frightened by her expression but tried to speak coolly. "Why,
was it as bad as that paper said?" I asked.

She laid her hand on my arm, "Child, it was nothing like what the paper
said...it was so much worse!"

"Oh ..." I commented inadequately.

"I was five days looking for her...they'd moved from the address the paper
give. And, in those five days, I saw so many others..._so many others_..."
her face twitched. She put one lean old hand before her eyes. Then, quite
unexpectedly, she cast out at me an exclamation which made my notion of
the pretty picturesqueness of her adventure seem cheap and trivial and
superficial. "Jombatiste is right!" she cried to me with a bitter
fierceness: "Everything is wrong! Everything is wrong! If I can do
anything, I'd ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything up
and start over! What good does it do for me to bring up here just these
three out of all I saw ..." Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusing
quavers, "but when I saw them ...the baby was so sick ... and little
Sigurd is so cunning ... he took to me right away, came to me the first
thing ... this morning he wouldn't pick up his new rubbers off the floor
for his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off ... you ought to
have seen what he had on ... such rags ... such dirt ... and 'twan't her
fault either! She's ... why she's like anybody ... like a person's cousin
they never happened to see before ...why, they were all _folks_!" she
cried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing to
another.

"You didn't find the little boy in the asylum?" I asked.