It was at this point that I had the following conversation with the grandmother, who was shrewd enough to see that the support of the baby was being left upon her hands, and that she could expect help from neither his father nor his mother, although she stoutly refused the advice that the whole matter be taken into the Court of Domestic Relations. “If I could only see Tommy once I think I could get him to help, but I can’t find out where he is, and he may not be alive for all I know; he was always that careless about himself. If he put on a new red necktie he’d never know if his bare toes were pushing out of his shoes. He probably didn’t get proper clothes for ‘the Klondike region’ and he may have been frozen to death before this. But whatever has happened to him, I can’t let his baby go. I suppose I’ve learned to think differently about some things after all my years of living with a light-minded husband. Maggie came to see me last week, for she means to be a good daughter. She said that Carrie and Joe were buying a house way out on the West Side, that they were going to move into it this month, and that she and I could have a nice big room together. She said, too, that Carrie would charge only half rate board for me, and would be glad to have my help with her little children, for they both think that nobody has such a way with children as I have. The night before, when she and Carrie were playing with the little boys, they remembered some of the funny songs father used to teach Tommy, and how jolly we all were when he came home good-natured and would stand on his head to make the candy fall out of his pockets. I know the two girls really want me to come back, and that they are often homesick, but when I pointed to the bed where the baby was and asked, ‘What about him?’ Maggie turned as hard as nails and said as quick as a flash, ‘We’re all agreed that you’ll have to put him in an institution. We’ll never have any chance with the nice people in a swell neighborhood like ours if you bring the baby.’ She looked real white then, and I felt sorry for her when she said, ‘Why, they might even think he was my child, you never can tell,’ although she was ashamed of that afterwards and cried a little before she left. She told me that she and Carrie, when they were children, were always talking of what they would do when they got old enough to work, how they would take care of me and move to a part of the city where nobody would know anything about the outlandish way their father and Tommy used to carry on. Of course, it was almost telling me that they didn’t want me to come to see them if I kept the baby.”