deepening twilight. At the first glimpse of her kindly face I took my
cue. I became a sweet, innocent, unfortunate lad. I couldn't speak. I
opened my mouth and closed it again. Never in my life before had I
asked any one for food. My embarrassment was painful, extreme. I was
ashamed. I, who looked upon begging as a delightful whimsicality,
thumbed myself over into a true son of Mrs. Grundy, burdened with all
her bourgeois morality. Only the harsh pangs of the belly-need could
compel me to do so degraded and ignoble a thing as beg for food. And
into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and
ingenuous youth unused to mendicancy.

"You are hungry, my poor boy," she said.

I had made her speak first.

I nodded my head and gulped.

"It is the first time I have ever ... asked," I faltered.

"Come right in." The door swung open. "We have already finished
eating, but the fire is burning and I can get something up for you."

She looked at me closely when she got me into the light.

"I wish my boy were as healthy and strong as you," she said. "But he
is not strong. He sometimes falls down. He just fell down this
afternoon and hurt himself badly, the poor dear."

She mothered him with her voice, with an ineffable tenderness in it
that I yearned to appropriate. I glanced at him. He sat across the