profitless conversation.

"She's bought the house," he said mildly, "and paid for it. And it's
hers. She's got a right to live in this neighbourhood as long as she
acts respectable."

The Very Young Husband laughed.

"She won't last! They never do."

Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing his
thumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes. On
his face was a queer look--the look of one who is embarrassed because he
is about to say something honest.

"Look here! I want to tell you something: I happened to be up in the
mayor's office the day Blanche signed for the place. She had to go
through a lot of red tape before she got it--had quite a time of it, she
did! And say, kid, that woman ain't so--bad."

The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently:

"Oh, don't give me any of that, Mooney! Blanche Devine'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 some place--where nobody knows her?"

That motion of Alderman Mooney's thumb against the smooth pipebowl
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! She's saved her money. 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 that seed known
as wild oats. He knew a thing or two, did the Very You