eople don't know us. We can't be anything
here."

Mrs. Gerhardt listened with a strong hope for a betterment of their
miserable life creeping into her heart. If Bass would only do this. If
he would go and get work, and come to her rescue, as a strong bright
young son might, what a thing it would be! They were in the rapids of
a life which was moving toward a dreadful calamity. If only something
would happen.

"Do you think you could get something to do?" she asked
interestedly.

"I ought to," he said. "I've never looked for a place yet that I
didn't get it. Other fellows have gone up there and done all right.
Look at the Millers."

He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked out the window.

"Do you think you could get along until I try my hand up there?" he
asked.

"I guess we could," she replied. "Papa's at work now and we have
some money that, that--" she hesitated, to name the source, so
ashamed was she of their predicament.

"Yes, I know," said Bass, grimly.

"We won't have to pay any rent here before fall and then we'll have
to give it up anyhow," she added.

She was referring to the mortgage on the house, which fell due the
next September and which unquestionably could not be met. "If we could
move away from here before then, I guess we could get along."

"I'll do it," said Bass determinedly. "I'll go."

Accordingly, he threw up his place at the end of the month, and the
day after he left for Cleveland.

CHAPTER XI

The incidents of the days that followed, relating as they did
peculiarly to Jennie, were of an order which the morality of our day
has agreed to taboo.

Certain processes of the all-mother, the great artificing wisdom of
the power that works and weaves in silence and in darkness, when
viewed in the light of the established opinion of some of the little
individuals created by it, are considered very vile. We turn our faces
away from the creation of life as if that were the last thing that man
should dare to interest himself in, openly.

It is curious that a feeling of this sort should spring up in a
world whose very essence is generative, the vast process dual, and
where wind, water, soil, and light alike minister to the fruition of
that which is all that we are. Although the whole earth, not we alone,
is moved by passions hymeneal, and everything terrestrial has come
into being by the one common road, yet there is that ridiculous
tendency to close the eyes and turn aw