One Basket

One Basket
THIRTY-ONE SHORT STORIES
BY EDNA FERBER

INTRODUCTION ix
THE WOMAN WHO TRIED TO BE GOOD 1

THE GAY OLD DOG 11
THAT'S MARRIAGE 29
FARMER
IN THE DELL 49
UN MORSO DOO PANG 68
LONG
DISTANCE 89
THE MATERNAL FEMININE 94
. . . . remainder
not included

The Woman Who Tried to Be Good [1913]
Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad
woman--so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down
Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without
once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her
on the street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth
looking at-- in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only
full-length mink coat in our town, and Ganz's shoe store sent to
Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you
frequently see in stout women.
Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round
Christmastime, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent,
dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out
of stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain set
with flashy imitation stones--or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow
hair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her

appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump
in the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and
paid in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She owned
the House with the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot--did Blanche
Devine.
In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She did
not look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much make-up, and
as she passed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain heavy scent.
Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman's
features look hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore an
expression of good-humored intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave her
somehow a look of respectability. We do not associate vice with
eyeglasses. So in a large city she would have passed for a well-dressed,
prosperous, comfortable wife and mother who was in danger of losing
her figure from an overabundance of good living; but with us she was a
town character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or the weak-minded
Binns girl. When she passed the drug- store corner there would be a
sniggering among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, and they would
leer at each other and jest in undertones.
So, knowing Blanche Devine as we did, there was something
resembling a riot in one of our most respectable neighborhoods when it
was learned that she had given up her interest in the house near the
freight depot and was going to settle down in the white cottage on the
corner and be good. All the husbands in the block, urged on by
righteously indignant wives, dropped in on Alderman Mooney after
supper to see if the thing could not be stopped. The fourth of the
protesting husbands to arrive was the Very Young Husband who lived
next door to the corner cottage that Blanche Devine had bought. The
Very Young Husband had a Very Young Wife, and they were the joint
owners of Snooky. Snooky was three-going- on-four, and looked
something like an angel--only healthier and with grimier hands. The
whole neighborhood borrowed her and tried to spoil her; but Snooky
would not spoil.
Alderman Mooney was down in the cellar, fooling with the furnace.

He was in his furnace overalls; a short black pipe in his mouth. Three
protesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband,
following Mrs. Mooney's directions, descended the cellar stairs,
Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a
haze of pipe smoke.
"Hello!" he called, and waved the haze away with his open palm.
"Come on down! Been tinkering with this blamed furnace since supper.
She don't draw like she ought. 'Long toward spring a furnace always
gets balky. How many tons you used this winter?"
"Oh-five," said the Very Young Husband shortly. Alderman Mooney
considered it thoughtfully. The Young Husband leaned up against the
side of the water tank, his hands in his pockets. "Say, Mooney, is that
right about Blanche Devine's having bought the house on the corner?"
"You're the fourth man that's been in to ask me that this evening. I'm
expecting the rest of the block before bedtime. She bought it all right."
The Young Husband flushed and kicked at a piece of coal with the toe
of his boot.
"Well, it's a darned shame!" he began hotly. "Jen