The hot water helped, but he blackened three towels before he could see his own skin. He put on a fresh shirt and stock and his best suit—for Patty’s sake—and went down to breakfast. It was the usual banquet of meat, potatoes, eggs, fruit, vegetables, hot breads, preserves, sauces, and coffee. The coffee bettered his inner being so much that he assumed the outer world improved. He found courage to look at the morning paper. RoBards was one of the seventeen hundred New Yorkers who subscribed to a paper. He took the _Courier and Enquirer_, edited by General Webb, who had proved himself a soldier, indeed, a year ago when the mob attacked his building and he drove it off. That was the first time the mayor was ever elected by a popular vote, and the riots gave little encouragement to the believers in general male suffrage. During the fire the _Courier_ reporters had been scurrying about gathering up information, and RoBards read with awe the list of streets destroyed and the summing-up: “Six hundred and seventy-four tenements, by far the greater part in the occupancy of our largest shipping and wholesale drygoods merchants, and filled with the richest produce of every portion of the globe. How estimate the immense loss sustained, or the fearful consequences to the general prosperity?” The paper dropped from RoBards’ hands. If that had been the state of affairs at the hour when the paper’s forms were closed, where could the fire be now? He rose to go to the roof and see if herald embers were not already alighting there. But the knocker clattered on the front door, and his heart leaped at the sound of Patty’s voice. He ran to meet her and take her pauper family under his roof, while it lasted. But she was alone. She was explaining to her astonished maid, Teen, that she had come home for clean clothes. She needed them evidently, for her pretty gown was streaked and blackened. She greeted her husband with a look as icy as the air she brought in with her from the street: “I see you haven’t blown up your own house yet, Mist’ RoBards. May I take some of the things my poor father bought me before you ruined him?” “Patty!” he groaned. It was some time before he dared go up the stairs she had scaled at a run. He went as reluctantly into her room as he had gone to the principal’s desk at the academy to be whipped for some mischief. His wife squeaked with alarm at his entrance. She had tossed her hat on the bed and her gown with it. She had taken off her stays and was still gasping with the relief. RoBards had vainly protested against her habit of spending half an hour drawing her corset strings so tight that she could hardly breathe, for the ridiculous purpose of distorting her perfect form, to make her bust high and her chest narrow. She stood before him in a chemise and petticoat, looking very narrow without her great skirts, and startlingly the biped in her ribboned garters and white silk stockings.