There were a goodly number of visitors to the Devil Baby of the type of those to be found in every large city, who are on the verge of nervous collapse, or who exhibit many symptoms of mental aberration, and yet are sufficiently normal to be at large most of the time, and to support themselves by drudgery which requires little mental effort, although the exhaustion resulting from the work they are able to do is the one thing from which they should be most carefully protected. One such woman, evidently obtaining inscrutable comfort from the story of the Devil Baby even after she had become convinced that we harbored no such creature, came many times to tell of her longing for her son, who had joined the army eighteen months before and was now stationed in Alaska. She always began with the same words. “When Spring comes and the snow melts so that I know he could get out, I can hardly stand it. You know I was once in the Insane Asylum for three years at a stretch, and since then I haven’t had much use of my mind except to worry with. Of course I know that it is dangerous for me, but what can I do? I think something like this: ‘The snow is melting, now he could get out, but his officers won’t let him off and if he runs away he’ll be shot for a deserter--either way I’ll never see him again; I’ll die without seeing him’--and then I begin all over again with the snow.” After a pause, she said: “The recruiting officer ought not to have taken him, he’s my only son and I’m a widow. It’s against the rules, but he was so crazy to go that I guess he lied a little--at any rate, the government has him now and I can’t get him back. Without this worry about him my mind would be all right; if he were here he would be earning money and keeping me and we would be happy all day long.” Recalling the vagabondish lad, who had never earned much money and had certainly never “kept” his hard-working mother, I ventured to suggest that, even if he were at home, he might not have work these hard times, that he might get into trouble and be arrested--I did not need to remind her that he had already been arrested twice--that he was now fed and sheltered and under discipline, and I added hopefully something about his seeing the world. She looked at me out of her withdrawn, harried eyes, as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. “That wouldn’t make any real difference to me--the work, the money, his behaving well and all that, if I could cook and wash for him. I don’t need all the money I earn scrubbing that factory. I only take bread and tea for supper and I choke over that, thinking of him.”