It was at this stage of experience that Mrs. Maloney decided to remove to the Big Flat. The last raid of Dennis, the youngest and only boy not housed at the expense of the State, had reduced her belongings to their lowest terms, and she took possession of her new quarters, accompanied only by a rickety table, three chairs, a bed with two old straw mattresses, and some quilts too ragged to give any token of their original characteristics, a stove which owned but one leg,--the rest being supplied by bricks,--and such dishes and other small furniture as could be carried in a basket. But there went with her a girl kicked out by the last man who had temporarily called her his mistress,--a mere child still, who at ten had begun work in a bag-factory passing through various grades of slightly higher employment, till seduced by the floor-walker of the store that it had been her highest ambition to reach. Almost as much her fault as his undoubtedly, her silly head holding but one desire, that for fine clothes and never to work any more, but a woman's heart waking in her when the baby came, and prompting her to harder work and better life than she had ever known. There was no chance of either with the baby, and when at last she farmed out the encumbrance to an old couple in a back building who made this their business, and took a place again in the store, it was relief as well as sorrow that came when the wretched little life was over. But the descent had been a swift one. When what she had called life was quite over, and she sat dumb and despairing in the doorway to which she had been thrust, thinking of the river as the last refuge left, the widow had pushed her before her up the stairs and said,-- "Poor sowl, if there's none to look out for ye, then who but me should do it?" This was the companion who lay by her side under the ragged quilts, life still refusing to give place to death, though every paroxysm of coughing shortened the conflict. "She's that patient that the saints themselves--all glory to their blessed names!--couldn't be more so; but I'd not know how to manage if it wasn't for the foot-warmer I call her; that's Angela there, wid eyes that go through you an' the life beaten out of her by the man that called himself her father, an' wasn't at all, at all. It's she that does the kaping of the house, an' sleeps across the foot, an' it's mine they think the two av 'em, else they'd never a let me in, the rules bein', 'no lodgers.' It's not lodgers they are. It's me boarders, full fledged, an' who's a better right than me, though I'd not be sayin' so to the housekeeper that'd need forty pair o' eyes to her two to see what's goin' on under her nose."