evine's a town
character. Even the kids know what she is. If she's got religion or
something, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn't she go to
another town--Chicago or someplace--where nobody knows her?"

That motion of Alderman Mooney's thumb against the smooth pipe bowl
stopped. He looked up slowly.

"That's what I said--the mayor too. But Blanche Devine said she wanted
to try it here. She said this was home to her. Funny--ain't it? Said
she wouldn't be fooling anybody here. They know her. And if she moved
away, she said, it'd leak out some way sooner or later. It does, she
said. Always! Seems she wants to live like--well, like other women.
She put it like this: she says she hasn't got religion, or any of that.
She says she's no different than she was when she was twenty. She says
that for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to be
able to go into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and,
if the clerk charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able to
sass him with a regular piece of her mind--and then sail out and trade
somewhere else until he saw that she didn't have to stand anything from
storekeepers, any more than any other woman that did her own marketing.
She's a smart woman, Blanche is! God knows I ain't taking her
part--exactly; but she talked a little, and the mayor and me got a
little of her history."

A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband. He had been
known before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of wild oats. He
knew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in spite of his youth!
He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked summer gown on the
street.

"Oh, she wasn't playing for sympathy," went on Alderman Mooney in
answer to the sneer. "She said she'd always paid her way and always
expected to. Seems her husband left her without a cent when she was
eighteen--with a baby. She worked for four dollars a week in a cheap
eating house. The two of 'em couldn't live on that. Then the baby----"

"Good night!" said the Very Young Husband. "I suppose Mrs. Mooney's
going to call?"

"Minnie! It was her scolding all through supper that drove me down to
monkey with the furnace. She's wild--Minnie is." He peeled off his
overalls and hung them on a nail. The Young Husband started to ascend
the cellar stairs. Alderman Mooney laid a detaining finger on his
sleeve. "Don't say anything in front of Minnie! She's boiling!