The thirty-seven-year-old
widow was horrified (but not much surprised) to find that the insurance
solicitor had allowed two of his own policies to lapse. The company was
kind, but businesslike. The insurance amounted, in all, to about nine
thousand dollars. Trust Hermie for never quite equalling that ten again.

They offered her the agency left vacant by her husband, after her first
two intelligent talks with them.

"No," she said, "not here. I'm going back to Chicago to sell insurance.
Everybody knows me there. My father was an old settler in Chicago.
There'll be my friends, and their husbands, and their sons. Besides, the
children will have advantages there. I'm going back to Chicago."

She went. Horace and Bertha Winter had died five years before, within
less than a year of each other. The old Rush Street house had been sold.
The neighbourhood was falling into decay. The widow and her two children
took a little flat on the south side. Widowed, one might with equanimity
admit stress of circumstance. It was only when one had a husband that it
was disgraceful to show him to the world as a bad provider.

"I suppose we lived too well," Hannah said when her old friends
expressed concern at her plight. "Hermie was too generous. But I don't
mind working. It keeps me young."

And so, truly, it did. She sold not only insurance but coal, a thing
which rather shocked her south side friends. She took orders for tons of
this and tons of that, making a neat commission thereby. She had a desk
in the office of a big insurance company on Dearborn, near Monroe, and
there you saw her every morning at ten in her neat sailor hat and her
neat tailored suit. Four hours of work lay behind that ten o'clock
appearance. The children were off to school a little after eight. But
there was the ordering to do; cleaning; sewing; preserving, mending. A
woman came in for a few hours every day but there was no room for a
resident helper. At night there were a hundred tasks. She helped the boy
and girl with their home lessons, as well, being naturally quick at
mathematics. The boy Horace had early expressed the wish to be an
engineer and Hannah contemplated sending him to the University of
Wisconsin because she had heard that there the engineering courses were
particularly fine. Not only that, she actually sent him.

Marcia showed no special talent. She was quick, clever, pretty, and
usually more deeply engaged in some school-girl love affair than