of Mrs. Katharine Calligan, the mother,
a dressmaker by profession and a widow--her husband, a house-mover by
trade, having been killed by a falling wall some ten years before--and
Mamie, her twenty-three-year-old daughter. They lived in a small
two-story brick house in Cherry Street, near Fifteenth. Mrs. Calligan
was not a very good dressmaker, not good enough, at least, for the
Butler family to patronize in their present exalted state. Aileen
went there occasionally for gingham house-dresses, underwear, pretty
dressing-gowns, and alterations on some of her more important clothing
which was made by a very superior modiste in Chestnut Street. She
visited the house largely because she had gone to school with Mamie
at St. Agatha's, when the outlook of the Calligan family was much more
promising. Mamie was earning forty dollars a month as the teacher of a
sixth-grade room in one of the nearby public schools, and Mrs. Calligan
averaged on the whole about two dollars a day--sometimes not so much.
The house they occupied was their own, free and clear, and the furniture
which it contained suggested the size of their joint income, which was
somewhere near eighty dollars a month.

Mamie Calligan was not good-looking, not nearly as good-looking as her
mother had been before her. Mrs. Calligan was still plump, bright, and
cheerful at fifty, with a fund of good humor. Mamie was somewhat duller
mentally and emotionally. She was serious-minded--made so, perhaps, as
much by circumstances as by anything else, for she was not at all vivid,
and had little sex magnetism. Yet she was kindly, honest, earnest,
a good Catholic, and possessed of that strangely excessive ingrowing
virtue which shuts so many people off from the world--a sense of duty.
To Mamie Calligan duty (a routine conformity to such theories and
precepts as she had heard and worked by since her childhood) was the
all-important thing, her principal source of comfort and relief; her
props in a queer and uncertain world being her duty to her Church; her
duty to her school; her duty to her mother; her duty to her friends,
etc. Her mother often wished for Mamie's sake that she was less dutiful
and more charming physically, so that the men would like her.

In spite of the fact that her mother was a dressmaker, Mamie's clothes
never looked smart or attractive--she would have felt out of keeping
with herself if they had. Her shoes were rather large, and ill-fitting;
her skirt hung