looked as old as her mother's, and whose diminutive figure seemed to me unusual somewhere. Was it not stunted? Her intelligence, her odd ways, her brilliant eyes captivated me. She called me "Uncle Diedel." She talked, like her mother, broken German. Supper, an extremely simple meal, but a feast to me, was always in the basement kitchen.
The tiny wooden house, owning something akin to squatter's rights which prevented its demolition, stood in the next block to my own, hemmed in by "brown-*stone fronts," but with a miniature garden. New York, that burns anthracite coal, has no blacks and smuts; the trees and shrubs were really green; the earth smelt sweet. The little house, standing back from the road, was a paradise to me. Its one ground-floor apartment was divided by folding doors into consulting- and waiting-rooms. But no patients came, or came so rarely that it was an event when the door-bell rang. The doctor had the greatest difficulty in keeping himself and family alive. At supper I used to eat as little as possible. He seemed a competent physician. I wondered greatly. As well as real human kindness, there was courage in that little building; there was also a great tragedy I sensed long before I discovered its solution. The strange innocence and ignorance of my up-bringing still clung to me.
The establishment, the poverty, the alternating moods, as I said, puzzled me; I was aware of a whole life hidden away from my observation. They were so poor that dinner was the meal of a workman, they could not even keep a servant. There were worrying debts as well. Often the doctor was so bearish and irritable that I dared not say a word, his wife got curses and abuse, he would almost kick the child, finding fault with such sneers and rudeness that I vowed to myself I would never eat his food again. Then, after a momentary absence in his workshop upstairs, where he kept a lathe and made beautiful chessmen, he would come slowly stumbling down again, and the door would open to a wholly different being. Bent, as always,
but well poised and vigorous, with bright smiling eyes,
