urs she would have passed unnoticed. She did
not look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much make-up, and as
she passed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain heavy scent.
Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman's features
look hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore an
expression of good-humored intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave her
somehow a look of respectability. We do not associate vice with
eyeglasses. So in a large city she would have passed for a
well-dressed, prosperous, comfortable wife and mother who was in danger
of losing her figure from an overabundance of good living; but with us
she was a town character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or the
weak-minded Binns girl. When she passed the drug-store corner there
would be a sniggering among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, and
they would leer at each other and jest in undertones.

So, knowing Blanche Devine as we did, there was something resembling a
riot in one of our most respectable neighborhoods when it was learned
that she had given up her interest in the house near the freight depot
and was going to settle down in the white cottage on the corner and be
good. All the husbands in the block, urged on by righteously indignant
wives, dropped in on Alderman Mooney after supper to see if the thing
could not be stopped. The fourth of the protesting husbands to arrive
was the Very Young Husband who lived next door to the corner cottage
that Blanche Devine had bought. The Very Young Husband had a Very
Young Wife, and they were the joint owners of Snooky. Snooky was
three-going-on-four, and looked something like an angel--only healthier
and with grimier hands. The whole neighborhood borrowed her and tried
to spoil her; but Snooky would not spoil.

Alderman Mooney was down in the cellar, fooling with the furnace.

He was in his furnace overalls; a short black pipe in his mouth. Three
protesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband,
following Mrs. Mooney's directions, descended the cellar stairs,
Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a haze
of pipe smoke.

"Hello!" he called, and waved the haze away with his open palm.

"Come on down! Been tinkering with this blamed furnace since supper.
She don't draw like she ought. 'Long toward spring a furnace always
gets balky. How many tons you used this winter?"

"Oh-five," said the Very Young Husband shor