e
rain."

"What's chewin' you now?" demanded Lise. She was not lacking in
imagination of a certain sort, and Janet's remark did not fail in its
purpose of summoning up a somewhat abject image of herself in wet velvet
and bedraggled feathers--an image suggestive of a certain hunted type
of woman Lise and her kind held in peculiar horror. And she was the
more resentful because she felt, instinctively, that the memory of this
suggestion would never be completely eradicated: it would persist, like
a canker, to mar the completeness of her enjoyment of these clothes. She
swung on Janet furiously.

"I get you, all right!" she cried. "I guess I know what's eatin' you!
You've got money to burn and you're sore because I spend mine to buy
what I need. You don't know how to dress yourself any more than one of
them Polak girls in the mills, and you don't want anybody else to look
nice."

And Janet was impelled to make a retort of almost equal crudity:--"If
I were a man and saw you in those clothes I wouldn't wait for an
introduction. You asked me what I thought. I don't care about the
money!" she exclaimed passionately. "I've often told you you were pretty
enough without having to wear that kind of thing--to make men stare at
you."

"I want to know if I don't always look like a lady! And there's no man
living would try to pick me up more than once." The nasal note in Lise's
voice had grown higher and shriller, she was almost weeping with anger.
"You want me to go 'round lookin' like a floorwasher."

"I'd rather look like a floorwasher than--than another kind of woman,"
Janet declared.

"Well, you've got your wish, sweetheart," said Lise. "You needn't be
scared anybody will pick you up."

"I'm not," said Janet....

This quarrel had taken place a week or so before Janet's purchase of the
stove. Hannah, too, was outraged by Lise's costume, and had also
been moved to protest; futile protest. Its only effect on Lise was to
convince her of the existence of a prearranged plan of persecution, to
make her more secretive and sullen than ever before.

"Sometimes I just can't believe she's my daughter," Hannah said
dejectedly to Janet when they were alone together in the kitchen after
Lise had gone out. "I'm fond of her because she's my own flesh and
blood--I'm ashamed of it, but I can't help it. I guess it's what the
minister in Dolton used to call a visitation. I suppose I deserve it,
but sometimes I think maybe if your father ha