Hertha looked straight at the begonia in the center of the table. How could she have said anything so stupid! Hertha Ogilvie had no brother. Now she would have to begin making up a story, lying about things. She ought to appear very angry. Imagine a white girl hearing her brother called a nigger and not resenting it; but again, imagine Hertha Williams sitting by the fire and warming herself and denying her brother Tom. "I don't know why American men should not cook," William Applebaum at length broke in with his deep, pleasant voice. "The greatest chefs in the world are men. I wish, Miss Hertha, you would let me turn cook like your brother and show me how to make this pudding." The meal finished, they left the dishes to be washed later and went into the front room where William Applebaum admired the picture which Hertha had framed. "Yes," Kathleen said, "Hertha is spoiling me with her pretty rooms and her good things to eat. I've not been to my Socialist local for a month now. It's so comfortable here the nights I can be home." "We went out last Thursday, Kathleen." "You're right, we did. And you should have been with us, Billy. Such a talk as we heard of the poverty in the South." "Perhaps Mr. Applebaum would have preferred the movie," Hertha said mischievously. She was quite herself again, and curled up on the cot, her back against the wall, was prepared to watch the two in their talk, for she knew well enough that she would soon be forgotten. Kathleen had given the armchair to her guest and sat erect in her straight seat. Her soft white shirtwaist set off her fresh cheeks, her gray eyes, her large but sensitive mouth. But she had no thought of her appearance, she was prepared to be serious. Her guest stretched in comfort in the big chair, his handsome head thrown back, his lighted pipe in his hand as he blew the smoke from between his lips. He would have been greatly pleased if Kathleen had chosen to tell of the moving pictures, but he saw at once that this was not her mood. "I wish I had been with you at both places," he said courteously, with a little touch of formality that the Irish girl ridiculed and the southern girl liked. "It must have been like going to the theater and seeing both a comedy and a tragedy, only in that case they usually put the comedy last." "That may be what they do at the theater but it isn't what they do in life." Kathleen was ready to talk. She sat in her chair and told the story of southern peonage and wrong. Hertha, who had failed to listen at Cooper Union, was moved in spite of herself at the tragic tale as it came from Kathleen's lips. It was the same in all essentials, but vivified by a rare imagination and a compelling sympathy. The Irishwoman became herself the thin, yellow, starved mother dragging her steps from her unlovely home into the hot, relentless fields. "Have you ever seen anything like that?" William Applebaum asked of Hertha when the story came to an end.