That night in an attic-like room of an old building opposite Morningside Park a tiny supper-table for two stood ready in the middle of the floor; the supper itself, the entire meal, was spread. There is a victory which human nature in thousands of lives daily wins over want, that though it cannot drive poverty from the scene, it can hide its desolation by the genius of choice and of touch. A battle of that brave and desperate kind had been won in this garret. Lacking every luxury, it had the charm of tasteful bareness, of exquisite¹ penury². The supper-table of cheap wood roughly carpentered was hidden under a piece of fine long-used table-linen³; into the gleaming damask were wrought⁴ clusters of snowballs. The glare of a plain glass lamp was softened⁵ by a too costly⁶ silk shade. Over the rim⁷ of a common vase hung a few daffodils, too costly daffodils. The supper, frugal⁸ to a bargain, tempted⁹ the eye and the appetite by the good sense with which it had been chosen and prepared. Thus the whole scene betokened¹⁰ human nature at bay but victorious¹¹ in the presence of that wolf, whose near-by howl startles the poor out of their sleep.  
Into this empty room sounds penetrated¹² through a door. They proceeded from piano-keys evidently so old that one wondered whether possibly they had not begun to be played on in the days of Beethoven, whether they were not such as were new on the clavichord¹³ of Bach. The fingers that pressed them were unmistakably those of a child. As the hands wandered up and down the keyboard, the ear now and then took notice of a broken string. There were many of these broken strings¹⁴. The instrument plainly announced itself to be a remote, well-nigh mythical¹⁵ ancestor of the modern piano, preternaturally lingering on amid an innumerable deafening¹⁶ progeny¹⁷. It suggested a superannuated¹⁸ human being whose loudest utterances¹⁹ have sunk to ghostly whispers in a corner.
 
Once the wandering hands stopped and a voice was heard. It sounded as though pitched to reach some one in an inner room farther away, possibly a person who might just have passed from a kitchen to a bedroom to make some change of dress. It was a very affectionate voice, very true and sweet, very tender, very endearing.
 
"Another string snapped to-day. There's another key silent. There won't be any but silent keys soon."
 
There must have been a reply. Responding to it, the voice at the piano sounded again, this time very loyal and devoted²⁰ to an object closer at hand:
 
"But when we do get a better one, we won't kick the old one down-stairs. It has done its best."
 
Whereupon the musical ancestor was encouraged to speak up again while he had a chance, being a very honored ancestor and not by any means dead in some regions. Soon, however, the voice pleaded anew with a kind of patient impatience²¹:
 
"I'm awfully²² hungry. Aren't you nearly ready?"
 
The reply could not be heard.
 
"Are you putting on the dress I like?"
 
The reply was not heard.
 
"Don't you want me to bring you a daffodil to wear at your throat?"
 
The reply was lost. For a few minutes the progenitor²³ emptied his ancient lungs of some further moribund²⁴ intimations of tone. Later came another protest, truly plaintive²⁵:
 
"You couldn't look any nicer! I'm awfully hungry!"
 
Then all at once there was a tremendous smash on the keys, a joyous²⁶ smash, and a moment afterward²⁷ the door was softly opened.
 
Mother and son entered the supper-room. One of his arms was around her waist, one of hers enfolded him about the neck and shoulders; they were laughing as they clung to one another.
 
The teacher of the portrait class and his pupils would hardly have recognized their model; the stranger on the hillside might not at once have identified the newsboy. For model and newsboy, having laid aside the masks of the day which so often in New York persons find it necessary to wear,—- the tragic²⁸ mask, the comic mask, the callous²⁹, coarse, brutal³⁰ mask, the mask of the human pack, the mask of the human sty,—model and newsboy reappeared at home with each other as nearly what in truth they were as the denials of life would allow.
 
There entered the room a woman of high breeding, with a certain Pallas-like purity and energy of face, clasping to her side her only child, a son whom she secretly believed to be destined³¹ to greatness. She was dressed not with the studied plainness and abnegation of the model in the studio, but out of regard for her true station and her motherly responsibilities. Her utmost wish was that in years to come, when he should look back upon his childhood, he would always remember with pride his evenings with his mother. During the day he must see her drudge³², and many a picture of herself on a plane of life below her own she knew to be fastened to his growing brain; but as nearly as possible blotting³³ these out, daily blotting them out one by one, must be the evening pictures when the day's work was done, its disguises dropped, its humiliations over, and she, a serving-woman of fate, reappeared before him in the lineaments of his mother, to remain with him throughout his life as the supreme³⁴ woman of the human race, his idol³⁵ until death, his mother.
 
She now looked worthy³⁶ of such an ideal. But it was upon him that her heart lavished³⁷ every possible extravagance when nightly he had laid aside the coarse half-ragged fighting clothes of the streets. In those after years when he was to gaze backward across a long distance, he must be made to realize that when he was a little fellow, it was his mother who first had seen his star while it was still low on the horizon; and that from the beginning she had so reared him that there would be stamped upon his attention the gentleness of his birth and a mother's resolve to rear him in keeping with this through the neediest hours.
 
While he was in his bath, she, as though she were his valet, had laid out trim house shoes and black stockings; and as the spring-night had a breath of summer warmth, of almost Southern summer warmth, she had put out also a suit of white linen knickerbockers. Under his broad sailor collar she herself had tied a big, soft, flowing black ribbon of the finest silk. Above this rose the solid head looking like a sphere on a column of triumph, with its lustrous³⁸ bronzed hair, which, as she brushed it, she had tenderly stroked with her hands; often kissing the bronzed face ardent³⁹ and friendly to the world and thinking to herself of the double blue in his eyes, the old Saxon blue of battle and the old Saxon blue of the minstrel, also.
 
It was the evening meal that always brought them together after the separation of the day, and he was at once curious to hear how everything had gone at the art school. With some unsold papers under his arm he had walked with her to the entrance, a new pang⁴⁰ in his breast about her that he did not understand: for one thing she looked so plain, so common. At the door-step she had stopped and kissed him and bade him good-by. Her quiet quivering words were:
 
"Go home, dear, by way of the cathedral."
 
If he took the more convenient route, it would lead him into one of the city's main cross streets, beset⁴¹ with dangers. She would be able to sit more at peace through those hours of posing if she could know that he had gone across the cathedral grounds and then across the park as along a country road bordered with young grass and shrubs⁴² in bloom and forest trees in early leaf. She wished to keep all day before her eyes the picture of him as straying that April morning along such a country road—sometimes the road of faint far girlhood memories to her.
 
Then with a great incomprehensible look she had vanished from him. But before the doors closed, he, peering past her, had caught sight of the walls inside thickly hung with portraits of men and women in rich colors and in golden frames. Into this splendid world his mother had vanished, herself to be painted.
 
Now as he began ravenously⁴³ to eat his supper he wished to hear all about it. She told him. Part of her experience she kept back, a true part; the other, no less true, she described. With deft⁴⁴ fingers she went over the somberly woven web of the hours, and plucking here a bright thread and there a bright thread, rewove these into a smaller picture, on which fell the day's far-separated sunbeams; the rays were condensed now and made a solid brightness.
 
This is how she painted for him a bright picture out of things not many of which were bright. The teacher of the portrait class, to begin, had been very considerate. He had arranged that she should leave her things with the janitor⁴⁵'s wife down-stairs, and not go up-stairs and take them off behind some screens in a corner of the room where the class was assembled. That would have been dreadful, to have to go behind the screens to take off her hat and gloves. Then instead of sending word for her to come up, he himself had come down. As he led the way past the confusing halls and studios, he had looked back over his shoulder just a little, to let her know that not for a moment did he lose thought of her. To have walked in front of her, looking straight ahead, might have meant that he esteemed⁴⁶ her a person of no consequence. A master so walks before a servant, a superior before an inferior. Out of respect for her, he had even lessened⁴⁷ the natural noisiness of his feet on the bare floor. If you put your feet down hard in the house, it means that you are thinking of yourself and not of other people. He had mounted the stairs slowly lest she get out of breath as she climbed. When he preceded her into the presence of the class, he had turned as though he introduced to them his own mother. In everything he did he was really a man; that is, a gentleman. For being a gentleman is being really a man; if you are really a man, you are a gentleman.
 
As for the members of the class, they had been beautiful in their treatment of her. Not a word had been exchanged with them, but she could feel their beautiful thoughts. Sometimes when she glanced at them, while they worked, such beautiful expressions rested on their faces. Unconsciously their natures had opened like young flowers, and as at the hearts of young flowers there is for each a clear drop of honey, so in {70}each of their minds there must have been one same thought, the remembrance of their mothers. Altogether it was as though they were assembled there in honor of her, not to make use of her.
 
As to posing itself, one had not a thing to do but sit perfectly⁴⁸ still! One got such a good rest from being too much on one's feet! And they had placed for her such a splendid carved-oak chair! When she took her seat, all at once she had felt as if at home again. There were immense windows; she had had all the fresh air she wished, and she did enjoy fresh air! The whole roof was a window, and she could look out at the sky: sometimes the loveliest clouds drifted over, and sometimes the dearest little bird flew past, no doubt on its way to the park. Last, but not least, she had not been crowded. In New York it was almost impossible to secure a good seat in a public place without being nudged or bumped or crowded. But that had actually happened to her. She had had a delightful⁴⁹ chair in a public place, with plenty of room in every direction. How fortunate at last to remember that she might pose! It would fit in perfectly at times when she did not have to go out for needlework or for the other demands. Dollars would now soon begin to be brought in like their bits of coal, by the scuttleful! And then the piano! And then the teacher and the lessons! And then, and then—
 
Her happy story ended. She had watched the play of lights on his face as sometimes he, though hungry, with fork in the air paused to listen and to question. Now as she finished and looked across the table at the picture of him under the lamplight, she was rewarded, she was content; while he ate his plain food, out of her misfortunes she had beautifully nourished his mind. He did not know this; but she knew it, knew by his look and by his only comment:
 
"You had a perfectly splendid time, didn't you?"
 
She laughed to herself.
 
"Now, then," she said, coming to what had all along been most in her consciousness—"now, then, tell me about your day. Begin at the moment you left me."
 
He laid down his napkin,—he could eat no more, and there was nothing more to eat,—and he folded his hands quite like the head of the house at ease after a careless feast, and began his story.
 
Well, he had had a splendid day, too. After he had left her he had gone to the dealer's on the avenue with the {73}unsold papers. Then he had crossed over to the cathedral, and for a while had watched the men at work up in the air. He had walked around to the choir⁵⁰ school, but no one was there that morning, not a sound came from the inside. Then he had started down across the park. As he sat down to count his money, a man who had climbed up the hillside stopped and asked him a great many questions: who taught him music and whether any one had ever heard him sing. This stranger also liked music and he also went to the cathedral, so he claimed. From that point the story wound its way onward⁵¹ across the busy hours till nightfall.
 
It was a child's story, not an older person's. Therefore it did not draw the line between pleasant and unpleasant, fair and unfair, right and wrong, which make up for each of us the history of our checkered⁵² human day. It separated life as a swimmer separates the sea: there is one water which he parts by his passage. So the child, who is still wholly a child, divides the world.
 
But as she pondered, she discriminated⁵³. Out of the long, rambling⁵⁴ narrative⁵⁵ she laid hold of one overwhelming incident, forgetting the rest: a passing stranger, hearing a few notes of his voice, had stopped to question him about it. To her this was the first outside evidence that her faith in his musical gift was not groundless.
 
When he had ended his story she regarded him across the table with something new in her eyes—something of awe⁵⁶. She had never hinted to him what she believed he would some day be. She might be wrong, and thus might start him on the wrong course; or, being right, she might never have the chance to start him on the right one. In either case she might be bringing to him disappointment, perhaps the failure of his whole life.
 
Now she still hid the emotion his story caused. But the stranger of the park had kindled⁵⁷ within her that night what she herself had long tended unlit—the alabaster⁵⁸ flame of worship which the mother burns before the altar of a great son.
 
An hour later they were in another small attic-like space next to the supper-room. Here was always the best of their evening. No matter how poor the spot, if there reach it some solitary⁵⁹ ray of the great light of the world, let it be called your drawing-room. Where civilization sends its beams through a roof, there be your drawing-room. This part of the garret was theirs.
 
In one corner stood a small table on which were some tantalizing⁶⁰ books and the same lamp. Another corner was filled by the littlest, oldest imaginable of six-octave pianos, the mythical piano ancestor; on it were piled some yellowed folios, her music once. Thus two different rays of civilization entered their garret and fell upon the twin mountain-peaks of the night—books and music.
 
Toward these she wished regularly to lead him as darkness descended⁶¹ over the illimitable city and upon its weary grimy battle-fields. She liked him to fall asleep on one or the other of these mountain-tops. When he awoke, it would be as from a mountain that he would see the dawn. From there let him come down to the things that won the day; but at night back again to things that win life.
 
They were in their drawing-room, then, as she had taught him to call it, and she was reading to him. A knock interrupted her. She interrogated⁶² the knock doubtfully to herself for a moment.
 
"Ashby," she finally said, turning her eyes toward the door, as a request that he open it.
 
The janitor of the building handed in a card. The name on the card was strange to her, and she knew no reason why a stranger should call. Then a foolish uneasiness attacked her: perhaps this unwelcome visit bore upon her engagement at the studio. They might not wish her to return; that little door to a larger income was to be shut in their faces. Perhaps she had made herself too plain. If only she had done herself a little more justice in her appearance!
 
She addressed the janitor with anxious courtesy:
 
"Will you ask him to come up?"
 
With her hand on the half-open door, she waited. If it should be some tradesman, she would speak with him there. She listened. Up the steps, from flight to flight, she could hear the feet of a man mounting like a deliberate good walke............