Our guest recalled with great pride that her grandmother had possessed second sight; that her mother had heard the Banshee three times and that she, herself, had heard it once. All this gave her a certain proprietary interest in the Devil Baby and I suspected she cherished a secret hope that when she should lay her eyes upon him, her inherited gifts might be able to reveal the meaning of the strange portent. At the least, he would afford a proof that her family-long faith in such matters was justified. Her misshapen hands lying on her lap fairly trembled with eagerness. It may have been because I was still smarting under the recollection of the disappointment we had so wantonly inflicted upon our visitor from the poorhouse that the very next day I found myself almost agreeing with her whole-hearted acceptance of the past as of much more importance than the mere present; at least for half an hour the past seemed endowed also for me with a profounder and more ardent life. This impression was received in connection with an old woman, sturdy in her convictions, although long since bedridden, who had doggedly refused to believe that there was no Devil Baby at Hull-House, unless “herself” told her so. Because of her mounting irritation with the envoys who one and all came back to her to report “they say it ain’t there,” it seemed well that I should go promptly before “she fashed herself into the grave.” As I walked along the street and even as I went up the ramshackle outside stairway of the rear cottage and through the dark corridor to the “second floor back” where she lay in her untidy bed, I was assailed by a veritable temptation to give her a full description of the Devil Baby, which by this time I knew so accurately (for with a hundred variations to select from I could have made a monstrous infant almost worthy of his name), and also to refrain from putting too much stress on the fact that he had never been really and truly at Hull-House.