"Don't you want me to bring you a daffodil to wear at your throat?"

The reply was lost. For a few minutes the progenitor emptied his ancient
lungs of some further moribund intimations of tone. Later came another
protest, truly plaintive:

"You couldn't look any nicer! I'm awfully hungry!"

Then all at once there was a tremendous smash on the keys, a joyous
smash, and a moment afterward the door was softly opened.

Mother and son entered the supper-room. One of his arms was around her
waist, one of hers enfolded him about the neck and shoulders; they were
laughing as they clung to one another.

The teacher of the portrait class and his pupils would hardly have
recognized their model; the stranger on the hillside might not at once
have identified the newsboy. For model and newsboy, having laid aside
the masks of the day which so often in New York persons find it
necessary to wear,--- the tragic mask, the comic mask, the callous,
coarse, brutal mask, the mask of the human pack, the mask of the human
sty,--model and newsboy reappeared at home with each other as nearly
what in truth they were as the denials of life would allow.

There entered the room a woman of high breeding, with a certain
Pallas-like purity and energy of face, clasping to her side her only
child, a son whom she secretly believed to be destined to greatness. She
was dressed not with the studied plainness and abnegation of the model
in the studio, but out of regard for her true station and her motherly