The door into the hall stood open, and presently another woman strayed in, scenting entertainment of some kind, and then a much younger woman followed, a slatternly creature with a sickly looking baby in her arms. Old Mrs. Donegan talked freely of her neighbors after Mary had tactfully won her confidence. She told her that most of them worked in the factory. The Polish woman in the basement washed for some of the factory hands, and although she worked all day and often far into the night, it took nearly all she could make to pay the rent. There wasn't enough to buy medicine for the girl, who was dying of consumption.
"Why don't they leave here and go out to the country?" asked Mary. "People out there need help, and they could at least have clean water, and clean grass to lie on. They'd be better off out under the trees than in that basement."
Mrs. Donegan's dim eyes narrowed shrewdly. "Did you ever see a rat caught in a trap?" she asked. "_It_ can't help itself. _It_ can't get out. No more can they. They can't even speak English."
"Don't you go to telling the landlord we complained," whined the woman with the baby. "He'd turn us out. Rents are so high everywhere that I tramped for days to find this place. The others was worse than this."
Mary's evident friendliness and warmly expressed interest soon started all three of the women to telling tales of Diamond Row. Mrs. Donegan's were the worst, as she claimed the distinction of being the oldest inhabitant. The one that aroused Mary's greatest indignation was of a child which had been drowned in the cellar ten years ago. The inside staircase going to the basement ran down over the cellar in some way, and it was so rotten in parts that it gave way one day and he fell through. It was in the spring, when the river was so high that the cellar was half full of backwater, and the child drowned before they could get him out.
Mrs. Donegan gave a dramatic account of it, omitting none of the gruesome details, for she had been fond of the pretty golden-haired boy of three, and sympathized with all the ardor of her warm Irish heart with the old grandmother, who was one of her best friends.
"That's sorrow for you," she exclaimed, shaking her head dismally. "If you could only see the poor old creature now, so crippled up with the misery in her bones that she can't leave her chair, and nothing for her to do all day but sit and eat her heart out with longing for little Terence. Ah, he was the fine lad, always hanging on his granny's chair and putting his little curly head on her shoulder to be petted. She keeps one of those curls always by her in a little box on the table, and like the sunshine it is. Come in and see it now. Do," she urged hospitably. "It's always glad she is to talk about him and cry over the sad end he come to."
