Maurice sat down and, very much bored, listened while Lily chattered on, with stories about Jacky: 

“He says to the milkman yesterday, ‘I like your shirt,’ he says.  And Amos—­that’s his name—­he said, ’You can get one like it when you’re grown up like me.’  And Jacky, he says—­oh, just as sad!—­I’d rather have it now, ‘cause when I grow up, maybe I’ll be a lady.’”

Maurice smiled perfunctorily.

“Ain’t he the limit?” Lily demanded, proudly; “he’s a reg’lar rascal!  He stuck out his tongue at the grocer’s boy, yesterday, ’cause he stepped on my pansy bed.  I wish you could ‘a’ seen him.”

Maurice swallowed a yawn.  “He’s fresh.”

“’Course,” Lily said, quickly, “I gave him a smack!  He’s getting a good bringing up, Mr. Curtis.  I give him a cent every morning, to say his prayers.”

Maurice didn’t care a copper about Jacky’s manners, or his morals, either; but he said, carelessly, “A kid that’s fresh is a bore.”

Lily frowned.  When Maurice, having explained about the letter box, gave her the usual “present” she made her usual good-natured protest—­but this time there was more earnestness in it, and even a little sharpness.  “I don’t need it; I’ve got three more mealers—­well, one of ’em can’t pay me; her husband’s out of work; but she don’t eat more than a canary, poor thing!  I can take care of Jacky myself.”

The emphasis puzzled Jacky’s father for a moment.  That Lily, seeing the growing perfection of her handsome, naughty little boy, was becoming uneasy lest Maurice might be moved to envy, never occurred to him.  If it had, he would of course have been enormously relieved; he might even have played upon her fear of such an impossibility to induce her to move away from Mercer!  As it was, after listening to the account of the pansy catastrophe, he got up to go, thankful that he had not had to lay eyes on the child, whose voice he heard from the back yard.

Lily, friendly enough in spite of that moment of resentment, went to the front door with him.  She had grown rather stout in the last year or two, but she was always as shiningly clean as a rose, and her little lodging house was clean, too; she was indefatigably thorough—­scrubbing and sweeping and dusting from morning to night!  “It’s good business,” said little Lily; “and it is just honest, too, for they pay me good!” Her only unbusinesslike quality was a generous kindliness, which sometimes considered the “mealers’” purses rather than her own.  She had, to be sure, small outbursts of temper, when she “smacked” Jacky, or berated her lodgers for wasting gas; but Jacky was smothered with kisses even before his howls ceased, and the lodgers were placated with cookies the very next day—­but that, too, was “good business”!  Her “respectability” had become a deep satisfaction to her.  She occasionally referred to herself as “a perfect lady.”  Her feeling about “imperfect” ladies was