matter what pace he should choose
to go or how many things he is driven by unhappiness to indulge himself
in?

And it was true that everything done up in the town had its effect down
in the Settlement. The lodge hall over the Last Chance was the only hall
available for the young people in the Settlement to dance, and the bar
of the East Chance, at which old Jacob Ensley officiated, was no better
stocked than the lockers at the Country Club. And all of us knew that
very frequently Billy and Nickols and the rest of our friends went down
to dance and drink with the girls from the mills and the shops. Billy
had told me once that Milly Burt, who stays at the cigar stand in the
Goodloe Hotel in Goodloets, dances so much like me and is so perfumed
with my especial sachet from France, Mother Spurlock having collected
the chiffon blouse from me for her to wear at the entertainment of the
Epworth League, that he came very near addressing her by my name in
giving her the invitation to the dance.

"Settlement or Town, they all add up to the sum of girl," he laughed, as
he told me about that Saturday night frolic in the Last Chance.

It was the day after Billy's account of the ball at the Last Chance, in
which Luella May and Milly and the rest had frolicked in what ought to
have been a perfectly harmless way, that Mother Spurlock came to spend
the afternoon with me and in which we wrestled until I was almost on the
mat--not quite.

"Goodloets has always been the gayest town in the state, but it has now
reached the place of the most wicked," she said, after a few preliminary
shots had been exchanged. "Every dignity of tradition seems to have been
dropped and everybody is dance or play or drink or speed mad. You are
the most influential personality in the whole town and I want you to
call a halt."

"But aren't they all happy? Isn't everybody getting the most out of
life? The men are all working to their capacity and making more money
than they ever have before. Why shouldn't they play hard?" I answered
her, as I seated myself in the broad window seat of my room opposite the
wide maternal ancestral rocker she had chosen.

"Are they happy?" she asked, with her keen eyes on my face.

"They seem to be," I parried.

"Well, as far as personal happiness is concerned I think it is not worth
talking about. It is the good of the whole for which I am working, for
which I am contending to-day. What you women do, who are not obliged to
a