heart, his strange indifference to his personal appearance. She observed
to her mommer that she never see a gempman go so shabby. She longed to
admonish Mr. V.V. on some of these matters, but on the whole hardly saw
her way clear. However, it is possible to do a thing or two by
indirection in this world, as one half the race has had gone reason to
learn. And one sultry night in mid-July, the little buncher seemed able
to talk of nothing but the astonishing suit Jem Noonan had just
obtained at the One-Price Outfitting Company for the somewhat laughable
sum of $7.90. A three-piece Prince serge, warranted fast, with the
English shoulders and high-cut vest, which only last week had been $15,
for Jem had seen it in the window with his own eyes, but had waited
around, knowing that the Mid-Summer Stock Rejuicing Sales were now about
due. Such a Chance Would Not Soon Occur Again: so it said on the card in
the window, and so Didymus himself would have believed, hearing Kern
Garland's abandoned eulogies....

And, sure enough, Mr. V.V., at length fired out of his purely civil
interest, was visited with a brilliant association of ideas, as his eye
betrayed. It was a matter, it will be remembered, which he had always
meant to take up some day.

"Did you say the One-Price," he inquired, not without an inner sense of
cleverness and enterprise, "or was it the Globe?"

Kern's heart thrilled. She was a woman, and hence the mother of all men.
And this, of course, was the moment to introduce quite simply, the
subject of the Genuine Mouldform Garments like the pixtures in the
magazines, $15, rejuiced from as high as $28.50, and would look, oh, so
fine and stylish long after the Prince serge had worn slick
and faded....

"But I thought you spoke of the Prince as something especially fine,"
said Mr. V.V., with rather a long face for the way expenses seemed to be
mounting up.

"Fine for on'y a carpenter, oh, yes," said Kern, "but not hardly what
you'd recmend to a doctor, oh, no."

The young man said ruefully that perhaps he had better investigate the
One-Price bargains, before Jem Noonan gobbled them all up. Then his eyes
rested on Kern across the table, and the light of enterprise died out
of them....

To take this child away from the Heth Works would be easy, indeed, but
what to do with her then? That was a question which money could not
answer. Kern's education had stopped at twelve. She was nineteen years
old, born to work, and q