[Pg 91] [Pg 91] SOMEBODY'S MOTHER [Pg 92] [Pg 92] [Pg 93] [Pg 93] V SOMEBODY'S MOTHER The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters, and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on their way for dinner to a French table d'hôte which they had heard of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the steps. It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly. "She seems to be sick or [Pg 94] something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or asleep." [Pg 94] The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn, and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress, which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would not have dressed so for that problematical French table d'hôte; probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman. "She seems to be asleep," he reported.
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