at home. Politics, unions, world events, local happenings,
neighbourhood gossip, all fed the endless stream of his loquacity.

"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rins'ance, one these here big
concerns--"

After he was gone Mrs. Scaritt used to find herself listening to the
silence. His ceaseless talk had often rasped her nerves to the point of
hysteria, but now she missed it as we miss a dull ache to which we have
grown accustomed.

Chug was in his second year at the Chippewa high school. He had always
earned some money, afternoons and Saturdays. Now he quit to go to work
in earnest. His mother took it hard.

"I wanted you to have an education," she said. "Not just schooling. An
education." Mittie Scaritt had always had ambition and a fierce sort of
pride. She had needed them to combat Len's shiftlessness and slack good
nature. They had kept the two-story frame cottage painted and tidy, had
her pride and ambition; they had managed a Sunday suit, always, for
Chug; money for the contribution box; pork roast on Sundays; and a
sitting room, chill but elegant, with its plump pyramids of pillows,
embroidered with impossible daisies and carnations and violets, filling
every corner.

Mrs. Scaritt had had to fight for Chug's two years of high school. "He
don't need no high school," Len Scaritt had argued, in one of the rare
quarrels between the two. "I never had none."

The retort to this was so obvious that his wife refrained from uttering
it. Len continued: "He don't go with none of my money. His age I was
working 'n' had been for three years and more. You'll be fixing to send
him to college, next."

"Well, if I do? Then what?"

"Then you're crazy," said Len, without heat, as one would state a
self-evident fact.

That afternoon Mrs. Scaritt went down to the office of the _Eagle_ and
inserted a neat ad.

LACE CURTAINS DONE UP LIKE NEW. 25
CENTS A PR. MRS. SCARITT, 639 OUTAGAMIE ST.

For years afterward you never passed the Scaritt place without seeing
the long skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against
the back porch in the sun. Mrs. Scaritt became famous for her curtains
as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green, or
his flesh tones. In time even the Hattons, who had always heretofore
sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be cleaned, trusted their lacy
treasures to Mrs. Scaritt's expert hands.

Chug went to high school on those lace curtains. He used to ca