d 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 now saw less and less. They h