"Does Max Linkheimer own this house?" Morris asked.

"Sure, he's the landlord," Mrs. Schenkmann went on. "I am just telling
you. For eight dollars a week a man should work! Ain't it a disgrace?"

"Well, why doesn't he get another job?" Morris inquired; and then, as
Mr. and Mrs. Schenkmann exchanged embarrassed looks and hung their
heads, Morris blushed.

"What a fine baby!" he cried hurriedly. He chucked the infant under its
chin and made such noises with his tongue as are popularly supposed by
parents to be of a nature entertaining to very young children. In point
of fact the poor little Schenkmann child, with its blue-white
complexion, looked more like a cold-storage chicken than a human baby,
but to the maternal eye of Mrs. Schenkmann it represented the sum total
of infantile beauty.

"God bless you, mister," she said. "I seen you got a good heart, and if
you know Max Linkheimer, he must told you why my husband couldn't get
another job. He tells everybody, lady, and makes 'em believe he gives my
husband a job out of charity. So sure as I got a baby which I hope he
would grow up to be a man, lady, my husband never took no money in
Dallas. Them people gives him a hundred dollars he should deposit it in
the bank, and he went and lost it. If he would stole it he would of gave
it to me, lady, because my Nathan is a good man. He ain't no loafer that
he should gamble it away."

There was a ring of truth in Mrs. Schenkmann's tones, and as Morris
looked at the twenty-eight-years old Nathan, aged by ill nutrition and