Mrs. Louder dropped into a chair and gasped. The baby, who had
fallen asleep, stirred uneasily. It was not a pretty child;
its face was heavy, its little cheeks were roughened by the wind,
its lower lip sagged, its chin creased into the semblance of a fat old
man's. But Jane Louder gazed down on it with infinite compassion.
She stroked its head as she spoke.

"Tilly," said she, "I've been in this block, Mrs. Carleton and me,
ever since it was built; and, some way, between us we've managed
to keep the run of all the folks in it; at least when they
were in any trouble. We've worked together like sisters.
She's 'Piscopal, and I guess I'm Unitarian; but never a word between us.
We tended the Willardses through diphtheria and the Hopkinses
through small-pox, and we steamed and fumigated the rooms together.
It was her first found out the Dillses were letting that twelve-year-old
child run the gasoline stove, and she threatened to tell Mr. Lossing,
and they begged off; and when it exploded we put it out together,
with flour out of her flour-barrel, for the poor, shiftless things
hadn't half a sack full of their own; and her and me, we took
half the care of that little neglected Ellis baby that was always
sitting down in the sticky fly-paper, poor innocent child.
He's took the valedictory at the High School, Tilly, now.
No, Tilly, I couldn't bring myself to leave this building, where I've
married them, and buried them, and born them, you may say, being with
so many of their mothers; I feel like they was all my children.
Don't ASK me."

Tilly's head went upward and backward with a little
dilatation of the nostrils. "Now, mother," said she
in a voice of determined gentleness, "just listen to me.