"Oh, mommer! Mommer! I can’t bear this! I _can’t_ be treated like this! Oh, mommer, not _me_! Not _me_! It can’t be true!" Her mother was glad when she wept. She stroked Angelica’s head in silence, pleased to see her softened, even humbled, happy to see that ferocious hardness gone; not suspecting that that ferocity and that hardness were the very best of Angelica, the very spirit of her. When she wept like this, she was submerged, perishing, _going under_. With a frightful effort she saved herself and rose above these bitter waters. "He’ll _pay_, all right!" she said, looking up with an odd, horrible grin. "You watch!" "Don’t talk so, my deary!" "Here--take it! Let’s see how much we’ve got to go on with," she interrupted, pushing the wallet across the table. "He’s always saying he hasn’t got a cent, but I notice he always finds plenty for anything he wants. God knows where he gets it, but he does." Her mother counted what was in the purse, and turned to Angelica with a look of amazement. "Why, Angie! There’s only four dollars here!" Angelica laughed. "It’s all we’ll get, anyway, mommer," she said. "It’ll have to do." CHAPTER THREE I Behold Mrs. Kennedy answering an advertisement for a janitress, far over on the lower West Side, in the Chelsea district. "I have the best of references," she told Mr. Steinberg, the landlord. "I’ve been where I am now for twelve years, and no complaints." "Den vy do you leaf?" "I don’t like living ’way up there," she answered calmly. "I’ve got more friends down around here. And my married daughter’s coming to live with me, and she’d rather be down here. She’s real lonely, now her husband’s gone to the war." This was her ruse to preserve that respectability which no one valued or even observed. She got the place, because of her decency and her references. There was nothing to be said against her in any quarter. What is more, Mr. Steinberg felt from the look of her that she was a hard worker. Like her other place, it was a "cold water" flat; there was a man to look after the furnace, but everything else was to be done by her, for her rent and an incredibly small stipend. She agreed. Her sole asset was her readiness to undertake hard and unremitting labour. There was not a thing which she could do better than the average woman, so that her boast, her credit, must be that she did _more_. "My married daughter’s thinking of taking in sewing," she said. "Maybe you could put a little work in her way." "Ve’ll see," said Mr. Steinberg, "later on, maybe." Now that she had secured a refuge, where Angelica might assume respectability among complete strangers, the poor woman’s next preoccupation was to find some way of having her pitiful furniture moved. She went about for days, trying to drive bargains with any one who possessed a cart; but war-time prices and conditions prevailed, and no one cared to accept so unprofitable a task.