It was odd how in a day our point of view had changed. If I had brought Ruth and the boy down through here a month before, we would all, I think, have been more impressed by the congestion and the picturesque details of the squalor than anything else. We would have picked our way gingerly and Ruth would have sighed often in pity and, comparing the lives of these people with our own, would probably have made an extra generous contribution to the Salvation Army the next time they came round. I'm not saying now that there isn't misery enough there and in every like section of every city, but I'll say that in a great many cases the same people who grovel in the filth here would grovel in a different kind of filth if they had ten thousand a year. At that you can't blame them greatly for they don't know any better. But when you learn, as I learned later, that some of the proprietors of these second hand stores and fly-blown butcher shops have sons in Harvard and daughters in Wellesley, it makes you think. But I'm running ahead. The point was that now that we felt ourselves in a way one of these people and viewed the street not from the superior height of native-born Americans but just as emigrants, neither the soiled clothes of the inhabitants nor the cluttered street swarming with laughing youngsters impressed us unfavorably at all. The impassive men smoking cigarettes at their doors looked contented enough, the women were not such as to excite pity, and if you noticed, there were as many children around the local soda water fountains as you'd find in a suburban drug store. They all had clothes enough and appeared well fed and if some of them looked pasty, the sweet stuff in the stores was enough to account for that. At any rate we came back to our flat that day neither depressed nor discouraged but decidedly in better spirits. Of course we had seen only the surface and I suspected that when we really got into these lives we'd find a bad condition of things. It must be so, for that was the burden of all we read. But we would have time enough to worry about that when we discovered it for ourselves. CHAPTER VI I BECOME A DAY LABORER That night Ruth and I had a talk about the boy. We both came back from our walk, with him more on our minds than anything else. He had been interested in everything and had asked about a thousand questions and gone to bed eager to be out on the street again the next day. We knew we couldn't keep him cooped up in the flat all the time and of course both Ruth and I were going to be too busy to go out with him every time he went. As for letting him run loose around these streets with nothing to do, that would be sheer foolhardiness. It was too late in the season to enroll him in the public schools and even that would have left him idle during the long summer months.