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Updated: June 15, 2025
A wavering light on the upper landing warned them that they might be overheard. A moment later some one demanded to know who was there. "Come down and see!" called Nance. Mrs. Snawdor, lamp in hand, cautiously descended. "Is that you, Nance?" she cried. "It's about time you was comin' to see to the movin' an' help tend to things. Who's that there with you?" "Don't you know?"
"Oh, they won't do nothin' to 'em," said Mrs. Snawdor, pouring hot water over the coffee grounds and shaking the pot vigorously. "Everybody knows it was the Clarke boy that bust the window. Clarke's Bottle Works' son, you know, up there on Zender Street." "Was it the Clarke boy and Dan Lewis that started the fracas?" asked Uncle Jed. "No, it was me!" put in Nance.
Looks like a shame fer a woman never to be fixed to go nowhere!" Mr. Snawdor, who had been trying ineffectually to get in a word, took this remark personally and in muttering tones called Heaven to witness that it was none of his fault that she didn't have the right clothes, and that it was a pretty kind of a world that would keep a man from gettin' on just because he was honest, and
Never had Nance tripped so lightly down those dark, narrow stairs the stairs her feet had helped to wear away in her endless pilgrimages with buckets of coal and water and beer, with finished and unfinished garments, and omnipresent Snawdor babies. She was leaving it all forever, along with the smell of pickled herrings and cabbage and soapsuds. But she was not going to forget the family!
Mr. Snawdor, Fidy Yager, Mrs. Smelts, and a dozen others, being the unfittest to survive, had paid the price of enlightenment. One sultry July night four years later Dr. Isaac Lavinski, now an arrogant member of the staff at the Adair Hospital, paused on his last round of the wards and cocked an inquiring ear above the steps that led to the basement.
Snawdor had gotten herself down the two flights of stairs, and was emerging from the door of the tenement, taking down her curl papers as she came. She was a plump, perspiring person who might have boasted good looks had it not been for two eye-teeth that completely dominated her facial landscape. "You surely ain't fixin' to report her?" she asked ingratiatingly of Mason.
Early in the autumn Birdie took flight from the alley, and Nance found herself hopelessly engulfed in domestic affairs. Mr. Snawdor, who had been doing the work during her long absence, took advantage of her return to have malarial fever. He had been trying to have it for months, but could never find the leisure hour in which to indulge in the preliminary chill.
Burks, lyin' there in bed fer four months now, takes more of a hand in helpin' with the childern than Snawdor, who's up an' around." "Kin he handle hisself any better? Mr. Burks, I mean." "Improvin' right along. Nance has got him to workin' on a patent now. It's got somethin' to do with a engine switch. Wisht you could see the railroad yards she's rigged up on his bed.
"If I was two years older, I could go to work," said Nance, thinking of Dan, who was now on the pay-roll of Clarke's Bottle Factory. "It ain't right to make you stop school," said Mr. Snawdor. "It ain't bein' fair to you." "I'd do it all right," said Nance, fired by his magnanimity, "only they're on to me now I've reported myself. Ain't you makin' any money at the shop?" Mr.
"A growin' girl oughtn't to be doin' heavy washin' an' carryin' water an' coal up two flights." "Why, Nance is strong as a ox," Mrs. Snawdor insisted, "an' as fer eatin'! Why it looks like she never can git filled up." "Well, what ails her then?" persisted Uncle Jed. "I bet I know!" said Mrs. Snawdor darkly. "It's that there vaccination.
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