“Father's creditors have seized the paper and the house in Stuyvesant Square. Everything is tied up. There is to be an investigation. My Aunt Matilda is here--this is her house---but we can't ask her to support us. Henry, here is something you can do! Betty is staying at my old rooms. Try to see her to-day. Could you?” He nodded. “Surely.” “Have her get some one to come in with her--take the place off my hands. Every cent of the little I have is needed here. She'll be staying. That marriage of hers didn't work. She couldn't keep away from the Village, anyway. And please have her pack up my things and send them out. I only brought a hand-bag. Betty will pitch in and do that for me. She's got to. I haven't even paid this month's rent yet. Have her send everything except my books--perhaps she could sell those. It would help a little.” They heard a step on the uncarpeted back stairs. A door swung open. On the bottom step, framed in the shadowed doorway, stood a short round-shouldered woman. Lines drooped downward from her curving mouth. Her colorless eyes shifted questioningly from the girl to the man and back to the girl again. It was an unimaginative face, rather grim, telling its own story of fifty-odd years of devotion to petty household and neighborhood duties; the face of a woman all of whose girlhood impulses had been suppressed until they were converted into perverse resentments. The Worm, as he rose, hardly aware of the act, knocked the ashes from his pipe into the coal hod. Then he saw that her eyes were on those ashes and on his pipe. He thrust the pipe into his pocket. And glancing from the woman to the girl, he momentarily held his breath at the contrast and the thoughts it raised. It was youth and crabbed age. The gulf between them was unbridgeable, of course; but he wondered--it was a new thought--if age need be crabbed. Didn't the new sprit of freedom, after all, have as much to contribute to life, as the puritan tradition? Were the risks of letting yourself go any greater, after all, than the risks of suppression? Weren't the pseudo-Freudians at least partly right? “Aunt Matilda,” Sue was saying (on her feet now)--“this is an old friend, Mr. Bates.” The woman inclined her head. Henry Bales, his moment of speculation past, felt his spirit sinking. He said nothing, because he could think of nothing that could be said to a woman who looked like that. She brought with her the close air of the stricken chamber at the top of the stairs. By merely opening the door and appearing there she had thrust a powerful element of hostility into the simple little kitchen. Her uncompromising eyes drew Sue within the tragic atmosphere of the house as effectively and definitely as it thrust himself without it. Sue's next remark was even more illuminating than had been his own curious haste to conceal his pipe. “Oh,” murmured Sue, “have we disturbed”--she hesitated, fought with herself, came out with it---“mother?”