This, I beg to interpolate, was the small beginning of Mrs. Stone’s success. Haying shrewdness as well as energy, she soon discovered that keeping boarders was more profitable than making waists, and so she developed that side of her enterprise. When I saw her last, in the following May, she was mistress of a well-appointed mechanics’ boarding-house on Milwaukee Avenue, but her troubles had taken new form, for the contamination of the slums had begun to appear in her son, who was fast developing into an incorrigible, and she had sent for me in order to consult about a plan of placing him in a reformatory. But to return to the February evening, on which I called to talk with Mrs. Stone about a claim upon her husband’s people: I found her at home. One ran little risk of failing to find Mrs. Stone at home, her engagements abroad being confined to trips to the sweater’s shop for materials. I heard the swift clatter of her sewing-machine as I walked down the steps from the filthy pavement to the door of the basement where she lived. The room had always to me an effect of being brilliantly lighted. It was due to the illumination of two large lamps which were kept faultlessly clean and were burning often in the day as well as night, and in part to the general cleanliness of the room, not to mention the cheerfulness which radiated from Mrs. Stone. She turned from her machine as I drew up an empty soap-box and sat down in front of her, and one would have thought, from the contagion of her manner, that she never knew any mood but one of hopeful courage. But she had no time to spare, and when our talk was ended, she turned again to work, while I went over to another corner and chatted with the children and the boarders. I was waiting for my friend Kovnitz, whom I had asked to meet me there. Kovnitz was himself employed in the same trade as Mrs. Stone, although in quite another branch of it. He was a coatmaker, and had been brought up to work under the sweating system. Much of the value of his acquaintance, apart from my personal liking for him, lay for me in his thorough knowledge of the trade. He was a socialist, and a very ardent one; but his efforts for reform were directed mainly toward effecting organization among the workers of his kind, and with this I warmly sympathized. We were to go together in the evening to a gathering of the cloak-makers, and, when he appeared at Mrs. Stone’s, we lost no time in starting for the meeting-place on the South-side.