think maybe if your father had been different he might have
been able to put a stop to the way she's going on. She ain't like any of
the Wenches, nor any of the Bumpuses, so far's I'm able to find out. She
just don't seem to have any notion about right and wrong. Well, the world
has got all jumbled up--it beats me."

Hannah wrung out the mop viciously and hung it over the sink.

"I used to hope some respectable man would come along, but I've quit
hopin'. I don't know as any respectable man would want Lise, or that I
could honestly wish him to have her."

"Mother!" protested Janet. Sometimes, in those conversations, she was
somewhat paradoxically impelled to defend her sister.

"Well, I don't," insisted Hannah, "that's a fact. I'll tell you what she
looks like in that hat and cloak--a bad woman. I don't say she is--I
don't know what I'd do if I thought she was, but I never expected my
daughter to look like one."

"Oh, Lise can take care of herself," Janet said, in spite of certain
recent misgivings.

"This town's Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one," declared Hannah who,
from early habit, was occasionally prone to use scriptural parallels. And
after a moment's silence she inquired: "Who's this man that's payin' her
attention now?"

"I don't know," replied Janet, "I don't know that there's anybody."

"I guess there is," said Hannah. "I used to think that that Wiley was low
enough, but I could see him. It was some satisfaction. I could know the
worst, anyhow.... I guess it's about time for another flood."

This talk had left Janet in one of these introspective states so frequent
in her recent experience. Her mother had used the words "right" and
"wrong." But what was "right," or "wrong?" There was no use asking
Hannah, who--she perceived--was as confused and bewildered as herself.
Did she refuse to encourage Mr. Ditmar because it was wrong? because, if
she acceded to his desires, and what were often her own, she would be
punished in an after life? She was not at all sure whether she believed
in an after life,--a lack of faith that had, of late, sorely troubled her
friend Eda Rawle, who had "got religion" from an itinerant evangelist and
was now working off, in a "live" church, some of the emotional idealism
which is the result of a balked sex instinct in young unmarried women of
a certain mentality and unendowed with good looks. This was not, of
course, Janet's explanation of the change in her friend, of whom she