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Herman spoke again as if nothing had been said. "You have been slumming this afternoon?" "I do not like the name, but I suppose I have." "It isn't a cheerful day to go poking about alone among the tenement houses." "I was not alone," Ashe answered with a hesitation which she could not help noting and with a significant softening of voice. "Mrs. Fenton was with me." "Ah!"
But somehow it seemed a light thing to him. He could not helping nodding cheerfully now and then to the father whom he had so nearly lost; and, perhaps, never in all their lives had they been so precious to each other as when, hand-in-hand, they climbed the dark tenement stair together. Before thy reached the door they heard Sallie push a chair aside hastily, and come to meet them.
All things were coming to an end, the alley itself with them. One funeral I recall with a pleasure which the years have in no way dimmed. It was at a time before the King's Daughters' Tenement House Committee was organized, when out-of-town friends used to send flowers to my office for the poor.
"You got her all worked up, Betty. I'm not blaming you. It's just my jinx. She took it into her head I'd been treating you mean, and she kicked at the Casino. I gotta close it down or nix on the heir thing. That was enough for me. I'm going to turn it into a hotel." He relighted his cigar. "And now, just as I got her smoothed down, along comes this darned tenement business.
Once he said to me quite excitedly, walking up Eighth Avenue at two in the morning I was showing him some rear tenement slums in the summertime "God, how I hate to go to bed in this town! I'm afraid something will happen while I'm asleep and I won't see it!" That was exactly how he felt all the time, I am sure. And in those days he was most simple, a very Spartan of a boy.
Some of the old hands were gone for good and new ones must be broken in in their places, but there were many familiar faces to pass the counting-room windows into the mill yard. There were French families which had reappeared with surprising promptness, Michel and his pretty daughter were there, and a household of cousins who had come to the next tenement.
It is, after all, a sign that the tenement that smothers individuality left them this useful handle, and if the experience squashed the hopes of some who dreamed of municipal wash-houses on the Glasgow plan, there is nothing to grieve over. Every peg of personal pride rescued from the tenement is worth a thousand theories for hanging the hope of improvement on.
She crept to the window, and clinging with both hands to the sill, lifted herself up to see, by the shadows that lay among the chimneys, and the slanting gold of the sunshine which, thank God, warms the tenement house and the palace towers alike, how fast the hours wore on.
I encountered some rough work with janitors and janitresses in this region so rough, indeed, that I considered it a splendid missionary field; and when I found, crushed in the heart of that tenement region, a small Methodist Church, I became interested in its work. I copied its "bill-of-fare" from the board outside the door, and began, as time permitted, to attend its services.
Happily, their father, completely absorbed in a practical, scientific, and approving contemplation of the topography and material resources of the scene of his future labors, had no time to notice their defection. It was not until the stage drew up before a rambling tenement bearing the inscription, "Hotel and Stage Office," that he became fully aware of it.
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