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was ready to cry at
supper. This'll be a fine neighborhood for Snooky to grow up in!
What's a woman like that want to come into a respectable street for,
anyway? I own my home and pay my taxes--"
Alderman Mooney looked up.
"So does she," he interrupted. "She's going to improve the place--paint
it, and put in a cellar and a furnace, and build a porch, and lay a cement
walk all round."
The Young Husband took his hands out of his pockets in order to
emphasize his remarks with gestures.
"Whati's that got to do with it? I don't care if she puts in diamonds for

windows and sets out Italian gardens and a terrace with peacocks on it.
You're the alderman of this ward, aren't you? Well, it was up to you to
keep her out of this block! You could have fixed it with an injunction
or somethng. I'm going to get up a petition--that's what I'm going----"
Alderman Mooney closed the furnace door with a bang that drowned
the rest of the threat. He turned the draft in a pipe overhead and brushed
his sooty palms briskly together like one who would put an end to a
profitless conversation.
"She's bought the house," he said mildly, "and paid for it. And it's hers.
She's got a right to live in this neighborhood as long as she acts
respectable."
The Very Young Husband laughed.
"She won't last! They never do."
Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing
his thumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes.
On his face was a queer look--the look of one who is embarrassed
because he is about to say something honest.
"Look here! I want to tell you something: I happened to be up in the
mayor's office the day Blanche signed for the place. She had to go
through a lot of red tape before she got it--had quite a time of it, she did!
And say, kid, that woman ain't so--bad."
The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently:
"Oh, don't give me any of that, Mooney! Blanche Devine's a town
character. Even the kids know what she is. If she's got religion or
something, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn't she go to
another town-- Chicago or someplace--where nobody knows her?"
That motion of Alderman Mooney's thumb against the smooth pipe
bowl stopped. He looked up slowly.

"That's what I said--the mayor too. But Blanche Devine said she
wanted to try it here. She said this was home to her. Funny--ain't it?
Said she wouldn't be fooling anybody here. They know her. And if she
moved away, she said, it'd leak out some way sooner or later. It does,
she said. Always! Seems she wants to live like--well, like other women.
She put it like this: she says she hasn't got religion, or any of that. She
says she's no different than she was when she was twenty. She says that
for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to be able to go
into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and, if the clerk
charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able to sass him with a
regular piece of her mind-- and then sail out and trade somewhere else
until he saw that she didn't have to stand anything from storekeepers,
any more than any other woman that did her own marketing. She's a
smart woman, Blanche is! God knows I ain't taking her part--exactly;
but she talked a little, and the mayor and me got a little of her history."
A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband. He had been
known before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of wild oats. He
knew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in spite of his youth!
He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked summer gown on
the street.
"Oh, she wasn't playing for sympathy," went on Alderman Mooney in
answer to the sneer. "She said she'd always paid her way and always
expected to. Seems her husband left her without a cent when she was
eighteen--with a baby. She worked for four dollars a week in a cheap
eating house. The two of 'em couldn't live on that. Then the baby----"
"Good night!" said the Very Young Husband. "I suppose Mrs.
Mooney's going to call?"
"Minnie! It was her scolding all through supper that drove me down to
monkey with the furnace. She's wild--Minnie is." He peeled off his
overalls and hung them on a nail. The Young Husband started to
ascend the cellar stairs. Alderman Mooney laid a detaining finger on
his sleeve.