“Don’t you worry one little bit, honey,” Mrs. Manning told her. “You’ll never have to worry about rent or food—so long’s we’ve got anything to eat and a roof over our heads you’ve them too.”
They sat in the dining-room until long after midnight the evening Mimi returned from the country, devising ways and means of Mimi’s earning in some way enough to supply the needs of herself and “Petit Jean,” as she called the baby, to differentiate him from the Jean who had gone. Mr. Manning scratched his white head and pursed his lips as he gazed at the ceiling.
“You say you haven’t been taught a trade—you’re too good for housework—hm—let me see—let me see‑e‑e,” he spoke half to himself, half to the two women. Mimi volunteered the information that she could sew rather well. “You can? Why’n’t you tell me that before? Why, that settles it all! I’ll speak to some of my customers and get you plenty of work doing sewing by the day.” A smile, beautiful in its radiant joy at solution of the vexing problem, wreathed his face.
“But what about the baby?” his wife inquired. Mr. Manning’s face fell, wiped as clean of its elation as a blackboard when a damp cloth is passed over it. “I’ll tell you what we can do,” Mrs. Manning went on. “Days when I’m away we can put him in a day nursery.”
Mimi was not allowed to begin her new life for some time, however. On one pretext after another her day of beginning work was deferred by the Mannings. The most frequent excuse was that most of the people who needed the services of a seamstress had gone away for the summer. Though Mimi had now been in Philadelphia more than eight months she knew little of the city. Her life before the baby was born had been so limited a one she had seldom been farther from home than a few blocks. The hugeness of the city, its teeming streets, the roar of traffic, the hurrying throngs, each person in it set on his own affairs to the exclusion