te, the
neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children.
Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing
events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the
first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and
ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the
White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that
the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old
toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other
dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls,
and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and
fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she
used to devote to her clothes.

Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the
babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much
with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he
neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his
clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit
powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She
grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to
over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by
bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he
abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for
the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way
respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious
quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the
neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them
what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with
Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become
angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her
husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had
refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else
who seemed to make her story possible.

By the time that the third baby was old enough to carry his baby sister
and the fifth baby was in the crib, Red Martin's face had begun to grow
purple. He lost the gambling-room which was once his pride; it was
operated by a youth with a curly black moustache, whose clothes