ously small feet you frequently see in stout women.

Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round
Christmas time, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent,
dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out
of stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain set
with flashy imitation stones--or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow
hair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her
appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in
the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and
paid in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She
owned the House With the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot--did
Blanche Devine. And beneath her silks and laces and furs there was a
scarlet letter on her breast.

In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She did not
look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much perfumed white
powder, 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-humoured 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 neighbourhoods 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