Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/31

 alone of those above, but of those also that were about them, and yet, the poor were great in charity for the poor.

“I came,” he says, in his quiet, level tone, “I came to have pity for the poor and — admiration.”

You hear that Mark, the undertaker, cared for the living child as well as the dead mother; he stayed with his job after the funeral, and by and by people came to the undertaker with the business of life. His explanation is that he “could write and fix up insurance and things like that.” Others could write and fix up insurance; the point was that they trusted Mark to do it, all his neighbors, all nationalities, all ages; and he did it. One of the odd branches of this odd undertaking business was to fix up marriages. It seems that, among the poor also, there comes a time soon after the wedding when husband and wife fall out; love turns to what looks like hate, and sometimes becomes hate. In Jersey City, young married people used, when the crisis arrived, to go to Mark; they’d “tell him on each other”; and he would listen and seem to judge. But what he really did was to get everything said and done with, and then when they were tired and satisfied, and sorry, he “fixed ’em up.”

So far there is nothing so very extraordinary