As the months passed Mrs. Snawdor spent less and less time at home. She seemed to think that when she gave her nights on her knees for her family, she was entitled to use the remaining waking hours for recreation. This took the form of untiring attention to other people's business. She canvassed the alley for delinquent husbands to admonish, for weddings to arrange, for funerals to supervise--the last being a specialty, owing to experience under the late Mr. Yager.
Upon one of the occasions when she was superintending the entrance of a neighboring baby into the world, her own made a hurried exit. A banana and a stick of licorice proved too stimulating a diet for him, and he closed his eyes permanently on a world that had offered few attractions.
It was Nance who, having mothered him from his birth, worked with him through the long night of agony; and who, when the end came, cut the faded cotton flowers from her hat to put in the tiny claw-like hand that had never touched a real blossom; and it was Nance's heart that broke when they took him away.
It is doubtful whether any abstract moral appeal could have awakened her as did the going out of that little futile life. It stirred her deepest sympathies and affections, and connected her for the first time with the forces that make for moral and social progress.
"He wouldn't a-went if we'd treated him right!" she complained bitterly to Mr. Snawdor a week later. "He never had no sunshine, nor fresh air, nor nothin'. You can't expect a baby to live where a sweet-potato vine can't!"
"He's better off than me," said Mr. Snawdor, "what with the funeral, an' the coal out, an' the rent due, I'm at the end of my rope. I told her it was comin'. But she would have a white coffin an' six hacks. They'll have to set us out in the street fer all I can see!"
"Well, we better be doin' something'," she said. "Can't Uncle Jed help us?"
"I ain't goin' to let him. He's paid my rent fer the last time."
This unexpected flare of independence in Mr. Snawdor was disturbing. The Snawdor family without Uncle Jed was like a row of stitches from which the knitting needle has been withdrawn.
"If I was two years older, I could go to work," said Nance, thinking of Dan, who was now on the pay-roll of Clarke's Bottle Factory.