At times she would drop her work in her lap and stare wretchedly before her.

This was what she had never known; this was what made life around her grim and hard, relentless, frightening; this was what it was to be poor.

How it changed the whole city of New York.

Behind it, the sinister cause of it all, she thought confusedly now and then of the Great Death across the sea, of the armies, smoking battle-fields, the shrieks of the dying, the villages blazing, the women and children flying away.

But never for more than a moment.