She ceased to speak, overcome by a thousand obscure emotions which could find no outlet in words. She dimly realized that the facts in the case, to one who had known her boy from childhood, were far from creditable, and that no one could understand the eternally unappeased idealism which, for her, surrounded her son’s return. She was even afraid to say much about it, lest she should be overmastered by her subject and be considered so irrational as to suggest a return to the Hospital for the Insane. Those mothers who have never resisted fate nor buffeted against the black waters, but have allowed the waves to close over them, worn and bent as they are by hard labor, subdued and misshapen by the brutality of men, are at least unaffrighted by the melodramatic coarseness of life, which Stevenson more gently describes as “the uncouth and outlandish strain in the web of the world.” The story of the Devil Baby may have made its appeal through its frank presentation of this very demoniac quality, to those who live under the iron tyranny of that poverty which threatens starvation, and under the dread of a brutality which may any dark night bring them or their children to extinction; to those who have seen both virtue and vice go unrewarded and who have long since ceased to explain. This more primitive type embodies the eternal patience of those humble, toiling women who through the generations have been held of little value, save as their drudgery ministered to their men. One of them related her habit of going through the pockets of her drunken son every pay day, and complained that she had never found so little as the night before, only twenty-five cents out of fifteen dollars he had promised for the rent, long overdue. “I had to get that as he lay in the alley before the door; I couldn’t pull him in, and the copper who helped him home, left as soon as he heard me coming and pretended he didn’t see me. I have no food in the house, nor coffee to sober him up with. I know perfectly well that you will ask me to eat something here, but, if I can’t carry it home, I won’t take a bite nor a sup. I have never told you so much before. Since one of the nurses said he could be arrested for my non-support, I have been awful close-mouthed. It’s the foolish way all the women in our street are talking about the Devil Baby that’s loosened my tongue, more shame to me.”