Son is a friendly little lad. I felt that, if I left them alone together, he and mother would grow close in a day or two. I peeped one morning into the nursery. Mother was standing, looking dully at the spotless baby cot, the white wicker chairs, the little washable rugs on the floor, the gay pictures on the white walls. Her worn plump hands were folded one upon the other in a gesture that I know. Little son was in a corner, gravely building a tower. Little son has been taught that he must play without demanding help or attention from adults about him, that “son must help himself.” In Soho little boys are spanked and scolded and carried and physicked and loved and fed all day and all night. Mother called to little son a quaint love name, and he turned to her with his bright smile, understanding her love tone. Then he quietly turned away from her to his toys again. And mother stood there in that strange white baby world which was her grandson’s. Perhaps she was thinking of what she had thought to find him, like one of the children of her own young motherhood, dear burdens that one bore night and day. She was afraid to touch the crib, to soil the spotless rugs. Here was her grandchild, they were together, it is true. And her grandchild had no need of her. She felt alien, unnecessary. I felt the tears in my eyes. I ran in, called son to come to play with grammy and mother. He came readily, laughingly, speaking his baby phrases that are so adorably like the words we adults, his parents, use. I had been anticipating, even before she came, how much mother and I would enjoy his baby talk. But mother said in a very low voice, “You say he speaks, daughter. I do not understand the words he means to say now. And--he will never learn--learn my language.” And mother’s first tears fell. We had planned for every hour of her visit to us, even for the hours of needed rest between whiles. In those rest spaces she would come into our living room. She is not accustomed to sitting in living rooms. Her life has been a life of toil. And our living room is to her as strange a place as was to me the first sitting room I saw long ago. She looked with a little smile about her. She glanced at the bookcase, filled with books she cannot read, and about things she does not know. Finally her gaze rested upon a certain place, and my eyes followed hers. There stood the old candlesticks which she had known in her father’s home in Poland, and which had stood in her own kitchen in Soho. And there, in my living room stands also, with its bronze curves holding autumn leaves--the copper fish pot! “In America,” said mother quaintly, with a little “crooked smile” only on her trembling, questioning lips, “they have all things--so different.”