ike Jim," Eva cried, with a great groan of
pain.

"Eva, you ain't goin'? Wait a little while, and let me do somethin'
for you."

"You can't do anything. Come, Amabel."

Eva and Amabel went away, the child rolling eyes of terror and
interrogation at them, Eva impervious to all her sister's pleading.

When Andrew heard what had happened, and Fanny repeated what Eva had
said, his blame for Jim Tenny was unqualified. "I've had a hard time
enough, knocked about from pillar to post, and I know what she means
when she talks about a checker-board. God knows I feel myself
sometimes as if I wasn't anything but a checker-piece instead of a
man," he said, "but it's all nonsense blamin' the shoe-manufacturers
for his runnin' away with that woman. A man has got to use what
little freedom he's got right. It ain't any excuse for Jim
Tenny that he's been out of work and got discouraged. He's a
good-for-nothing cur, an' I'd like to tell him so."

"It won't do for you to talk to Eva that way," said Fanny. They were
all at the supper-table. Ellen was listening silently.

"She does right to stand up for her husband, I suppose," said
Andrew, "but anybody's got to use a little sense. It don't make it
any better for Jim, tryin' to shove blame off his shoulders that
belongs there. The manufacturers didn't make him run off with
another woman and leave his child. That was a move he made himself."

"But he wouldn't have made that move if the manufacturers hadn't
made theirs," Ellen said, unexpectedly.

"That's so," said Fanny.

Andrew looked uneasily at Ellen, in whose cheeks two red spots were
burning, and whose eyes upon his face seemed narrowed to two points
of brightness. "There's nothing for you to worry about, child," he
said.

All this was before the dressmaker, who listened with no particular
interest. Affairs which did not directly concern her did not awaken
her to much sharpness of regard. She had been forced by
circumstances into a very narrow groove of life, a little foot-path
as it were, fenced in from destruction by three dollars a day. She
could not, view it as keenly as she might, see that Jim Tenny's
elopement had anything whatever to do with her three dollars per
day. She, therefore, ate her supper. At first Andrew had looked
warningly at Fanny when she began to discuss the subject before the
dressmaker, but Fanny had replied, "Oh, land, Andrew, she knows all
about it now. It's all over town."

"Yes, I heard it th