bred to strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring them before me in that figure.  I cannot imagine ladies doing that kind of thing; I can only imagine women who had lived hard and worked hard all their lives doing it; who had begun to fight with want from their cradles, like that little one with the pail, and must fight without ceasing to their graves.  But I am not unreasonable; I understand and I understood what I saw to be one of the things that must be, for the perfectly good and sufficient reason that they always have been; and at the moment I got what pleasure I could out of the stolid indifference of the cart-driver, who never looked about him at the scene which interested me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of pungent odors from his pipe in the freezing eddies of the air behind him.

II.

It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it is what to do with the fact.  The question began with me almost at once, or at least as soon as I faced about and began to walk homeward with the wind at my back.  I was then so much more comfortable that the aesthetic instinct thawed out in me, and I found myself wondering what use I could make of what I had seen in the way of my trade.  Should I have something very pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day after day to pick up coke for her sick daughter’s freezing orphans till she fell sick herself?  What should I do with the family in that case?  They could not be left at that point, and I promptly imagined a granddaughter, a girl of about eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a sort of belle in her humble neighborhood, who should take her grandmother’s place.  I decided that I should have her Italian, because I knew something of Italians, and could manage that nationality best, and I should call her Maddalena; either Maddalena or Marina; Marina would be more Venetian, and I saw that I must make her Venetian.  Here I was on safe ground, and at once the love-interest appeared to help me out.  By virtue of the law of contrasts; it appeared to me in the person of a Scandinavian lover, tall, silent, blond, whom I at once felt I could do, from my acquaintance with Scandinavian lovers in Norwegian novels.  His name was Janssen, a good, distinctive Scandinavian name; I do not know but it is Swedish; and I thought he might very well be a Swede; I could imagine his manner from that of a Swedish waitress we once had.

Janssen—­Jan Janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which Marina’s grandmother used to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of coke as they were jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep indifference.  At first he noticed Marina—­or Nina, as I soon saw I must call her—­with the same unconcern; for in her grandmother’s hood and jacket and check apron, with her head held shamefacedly downward, she looked exactly like the old woman.  I thought I would have Nina make her