"She told me to
tell you please, 'm, to come if you could. Mrs. Cotter says she
can't die until she sees you, and she's so tired trying to hold out.
She won't have breath left to talk, mother says, if you don't hurry."
Perplexed, uncertain, I waited a half-minute longer. Mrs. Cotter,
the renter of Mrs. Gibbons's middle room, and sometime boarder, I had
seen frequently of late. Nothing human could have stood what she had
been forcing herself to do for some weeks past, and that resistance
should have yielded to relentless exaction was not to be wondered at.
Ten hours a day she sewed in the carpet department of one of the
city's big stores, and for some time past she had been one of the
office-cleaning force of the Metropolitan Building, which at night
made ready for the day's occupants the rooms which were swept and
dusted and scrubbed while others slept or played, or rested or made
plans for coming times. The extra work had been undertaken in order
to get nourishment and medicine needed for her little girl, who had
developed tuberculosis. There was nowhere for the child to go.
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