Once in a while I go to visit this old woman--my reputation must be sadly damaged by now. I sit with her for an hour or two and listen to her. She is extremely glad to have me there. Except me she has no one to talk to but the milkman, the groceryman, and the butcher. So always she is glad to see me. There is a certain bond of sympathy between her and me. We are fond of each other. When she sees me picking my way towards her house, her hard, sour face softens wonderfully and a light of distinct friendliness comes into her green eyes. Don’t you know, there are few people enough in the world whose hard, sour faces will soften at sight of you and a distinctly friendly light come into their green eyes. For myself, I find such people few indeed. So the profane old woman and I are fond of each other. No question of morals, or of immorals, comes between us. We are equals. I talk to her a little--but mostly she talks. She tells me of the time when she lived in County Galway, when she was young--and of her several husbands, and of some who were not husbands, and of her children scattered over the earth. And she shows me old tin-types of these people. She has told me the varied tale of her life a great many times. I like to hear her tell it. It is like nothing else I have heard. The story in its unblushing simplicity, the sour-faced old woman sitting telling it, and the tin-types,--contain a thing that is absurdly, grotesquely, tearlessly sad. Once when I went to her house I brought with me six immense, heavy, fragrant chrysanthemums. They had been bought with the three dollars I had stolen. It pleased me to buy them for the profane old woman. They pleased her also--not because she cares much for flowers, but because I brought them to her. I knew they would please her, but that was not the reason I gave her them. I did it purely and simply to please myself. I knew the profane old woman would not be at all concerned as to whether they had been bought with stolen money or not, and my only regret was that I had not had an opportunity to steal a larger sum so that I might have bought more chrysanthemums without inconveniencing my purse. But as it was they filled her dirty little dwelling with perfume and color. Long ago, when I was six, I was a thief--only I was not then, as now, a graceful, light-fingered thief--I had not the philosophy of stealing. When I would steal a copper cent out of my mother’s pocketbook I would feel a dreadful, suffocating sinking in my bad heart, and for days and nights afterwards--long after I had eaten the chocolate mouse--the copper cent would haunt me and haunt me, and oh, how I wished it back in that pocketbook with the clasp shut tight and the bureau drawer locked! And so, is it not finer to be nineteen and a thief, with the philosophy of stealing--than to be six and haunted day and night by a copper cent?