Kennicott was incredulous.

"I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and thankful you
may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into
something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will's wife
and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that
you ain't always as respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't
stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the
Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having a good
laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in you, yet just the
same you don't fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments
like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I
nourished in my bosom--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have
two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and
wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she care how much
they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly nothing on her board and
room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known
from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in
her trunk----"

Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene
wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis
in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and
unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that
she should be questioned.

Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a
barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern
had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern--she
confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn't
remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given
it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's
overcoat--which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become
soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and
wabbling, on the Bogart porch.

Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When
Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or twice I've smelled
licker on his breath." She also, with an air of being only too
scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till
morning. But he couldn't ever have been drunk, for he always had
the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake
spearing