Many individual instances are found in which a woman, hard pressed by life, includes within her tenderness the mother of an illegitimate child. A most striking example of this came to me through a woman whom I knew years ago when she daily brought her three children to the Hull-House day nursery, obliged to support them by her work in a neighboring laundry because her husband had deserted her. I recall her fatuous smile as she used to say that “Tommy is so pleased to see me at night that I can hear him shout ‘Hello, ma’ when I am a block away.” I had known Tommy through many years; periods of adversity when his father was away were succeeded by periods of fitful prosperity when his father returned from his wanderings with the circus with which “he could always find work,” because he had once been a successful acrobat and later a clown, and “so could turn his hand to anything that was needed.” Perhaps it was unavoidable that Tommy should have made his best friends among the warm-hearted circus people who were very kind to him after his father’s death, and that long before the Child Labor Law permitted him to sing in Chicago saloons, he was doing a successful business singing in the towns of a neighboring state. He was a droll little chap “without any sense about taking care of himself,” and in those days his mother not only missed his cheerful companionship but was constantly anxious about his health and morals. When he grew older and became a professional he sent his mother money occasionally, although never very much and never with any regularity. She was always so pleased when it came that the two daughters supporting her with their steady wages were inclined to resent her obvious gratification, as they did the killing of the fatted calf on those rare occasions when the prodigal returned “between seasons” to visit his family. It is possible that his mother thus early acquired the habit of defending him, the black sheep, against the strictures of the good children who so easily become the self-righteous when they feel “put upon.” However that may be, five years ago, after one daughter had been married to a skilled mechanic and the other, advanced to the position of a forewoman, was supporting her mother in the comparative idleness of keeping house for two people in three rooms, a forlorn girl appeared with a note from Tommy asking his mother “to help her out until the kid came and she could work again.” The steady daughter would not permit “such a girl to cross the threshold,” and the little household was finally broken up upon the issue. The daughter went to live with her married sister, while the mother, having moved into one room with “Tommy’s girl,” went back to the laundry in order to support herself and her guest.