"What's the matter?" I asked. "Why the poor little thing--" "What poor little thing?" I interrupted. "Michele's baby. It lay there in dirty rags with its pinched white face staring up at me as though just begging for a clean bed." "What's the matter with it?" "Matter with it? It's a wonder it isn't dead and buried. The district nurse came in while I was there and told me,"--she shuddered--"that they'd been feeding it on macaroni cooked in greasy gravy. And it isn't six months old yet." "No wonder it looked white," I said, remembering how we had discussed for a week the wisdom of giving Dick the coddled white of an egg at that age. "Why the conditions down there are terrible," cried Ruth. "Michele must be very, very poor. The floor wasn't washed, you couldn't see out of the windows, and the clothes--" She held up her hands unable to find words. "That _does_ sound bad," I said. "It's criminal. Billy--we can't allow a family in the same house with us to suffer like that, can we?" I shook my head. "Then go down and see what you can do. I guess we can squeeze out fifty cents for them, can't we, Billy?" "I guess you could squeeze fifty cents out of a stone for a sick baby," I said. The upshot of it was that I went down and saw Michele. As Ruth had said his quarters were anything but clean but they didn't impress me as being in so bad a condition as she had described them. Perhaps my work in the ditch had made me a little more used to dirt. I found Michele a healthy, temperate, able-bodied man and I learned that he was earning as much as I. Not only that but the women took in garments to finish and picked up the matter of two or three dollars a week extra. There were five in the family but they were far from being in want. In fact Michele had a good bank account. They had all they wanted to eat, were warm and really prosperous. There was absolutely no need of the dirt. It was there because they didn't mind it. A five cent cake of soap would have made the rooms clean as a whistle and there were two women to do the scrubbing. I didn't leave my fifty cents but I came back upstairs with a better appreciation, if that were possible, of what such a woman as Ruth means to a man. Even the baby began to get better as soon as the district nurse drove into the parent's head a few facts about sensible infant feeding.