fitted her for the teaching profession
and completed her social emancipation but for her vain and thriftless
mother, who, socially ambitious for herself but more for her handsome,
clever children, found herself increasingly embarrassed for funds. She
lacked the means with which to suitably adorn herself and her children
for the station in life to which she aspired and for which good clothes
were the prime equipment and to "eddicate" Tony as he deserved. Hence
when Annette had completed her second year at the High School her mother
withdrew her from the school and its associations and found her a place
in the new Fancy Box Factory, where girls could obtain "an illigant and
refoined job with good pay as well."

This change in Annette's outlook brought wrathful disappointment to the
head master, Alex Day, who had taken a very special pride in Annette's
brilliant school career and who had outlined for her a University
course. To Annette herself the ending of her school days was a bitter
grief, the bitterness of which would have been greatly intensified had
she been able to measure the magnitude of the change to be wrought in
her life by her mother's foolish vanity and unwise preference of her
son's to her daughter's future.

The determining factor in Annette's submission to her mother's will was
consideration for her brother and his career. For while for her father
she cherished an affectionate pride and for her mother an amused and
protective pity, her great passion was for her brother--her handsome,
vivacious, audacious and mercurial brother, Tony. With him she counted
it only joy to share her all too meagre wages whenever he found himself
in financial straits. And a not infrequent situation this was with Tony,
who, while he seemed to have inherited from his mother the vivacity,
quick wit and general empty-headedness, from his father got nothing of
the thrift and patient endurance of grinding toil characteristic of the
French-Canadian habitant. But he did get from his father a capacity for
the knowing and handling of machinery, which amounted almost to genius.
Of the father's steadiness under the grind of daily work which had made
him the head mechanic in the Mill, Tony possessed not a tittle. What
he could get easily he got, and getting this fancied himself richly
endowed, knowing not how slight and superficial is the equipment for
life's stern fight that comes without sweat of brain and body. His
cleverness deceived f