It was a wretched, lonely little room, where the cracks let the
boisterous wind whistle through, and the smoky, grimy walls looked
cheerless and unhomelike. A miserable little room in a miserable little
cottage in one of the squalid streets of the Third District that nature
and the city fathers seemed to have forgotten.
As bare and comfortless the room, so was Miss Sophie's lonely life. She
rented these four walls from an unkempt little Creole woman, whose
progeny seemed like the promised offspring of Abraham,--multitudinous.
The flickering life in the pale little body she scarcely kept there by
the unceasing toil of a pair of bony hands, stitching, stitching,
ceaselessly, wearingly on the bands and pockets of pants. It was her
bread, this monotonous, unending work, and though while days and nights
constant labor brought but the most meagre recompense, it was her only
hope of life.
She sat before the little charcoal brazier and warmed her transparent,
needle-pricked fingers, thinking meanwhile of the strange events of the
day. She had been up town to carry the great, black bundle of pants and
vests to the factory and receive her small pittance, and on the way home
stopped in at the Jesuit Church to say her little prayer at the altar of
the calm, white Virgin.
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