asped the back of it angrily. "You knew it would make me mad. You have
always made me mad by fetching that poor, unsuspecting boy into the
dirty ways of them two women. He's never had his eyes open about that,
nohow. He is too pure-minded, too busy with his work, too dreamy to stop
and compare his folks, bad as they are, with others. But if you think
that I am going to take up a bucketful of slime--and other folks' slime
at that--and dash it into the blooming faces of that happy, innocent
pair of sweethearts, you don't know me. A catty old maid would go a
thousand miles to get a chance to do it, but no man with sound blood in
his veins and a heart in his chest would do it for high pay. You ought
to be ashamed of yourself for thinking of it--even for letting it dirty
your mind for a minute."

Mrs. Cavanaugh, unconvinced and with a ponderous shrug, began to pile
the dishes together. "You are a man and can't understand," she said.
"Any woman would know what I mean."

"And she'd know _more_ than you mean, too, if she was a woman," Samuel
sneered, testily.

His wife received this in dead silence. She pushed her gold-rimmed
spectacles up into her flowsy gray hair and let them rest there, and, as
if regretful of his heat, Cavanaugh added, more gently, "It is a pity
for you and me to fly up like this when I've just got home."

"You and _me_?" she answered, mildly and with a tantalizing smile. "Huh!
how high do you think _I_ flew, Sam Cavanaugh? I've certainly been on a
dead level, but you went over the church steeples like a hot-air balloon
in a wind-storm. I'm on the ground, flat-footed, and I'm going to stay
on it. I look beyond the end of my nose, and you don't, that's all. You
can build houses, but you can't start families out right in a town like
this one. Now listen to me. What do you think that poor girl will do in
Pete Carrol's house all by herself? Who will go to see her? What church
will she attend? What will she do--in the name of all possessed, what
will she do with her mother-in-law?"

Cavanaugh, as he sat down again, slid lower into defeat than he had been
for many a day. "Listen to me," he began, resting his folded hands on
the table and clearing his throat, for his voice was husky. "Now you
have hit on something, and I'm going to be plain about it. I don't
often speak about my terrible struggles over spiritual matters and the
things I sometimes have to settle between me and my Maker, but I'm going
to admit