reet as
often as possible, and when they were at home, added their complaints
and protests to the general unpleasantness.

Had there been anything different before her eyes, who knows what plans
for domestic reform might have taken shape in the girl's plastic brain?
Emeline had never seen one example of real affection and cooperation
between mother and daughters, of work quickly and skilfully done and
forgotten, of a clean bright house and a blossoming garden; she had
never heard a theory otherwise than that she was poor, her friends were
poor, her parents were poor, and that born under the wheels of a
monstrous social injustice, she might just as well be dirty and
discouraged and discontented at once and have done with it, for in the
end she must be so. Why should she question the abiding belief? Emeline
knew that, with her father's good pay and the excellent salaries earned
by her hard-handed, patient-eyed, stupid young brothers, the family
income ran well up toward three hundred dollars a month: her father
worked steadily at five dollars a day, George was a roofer's assistant
and earned eighty dollars a month, and Chester worked in a plumber's
shop, and at eighteen was paid sixty-five dollars. Emeline could only
conclude that three hundred dollars a month was insufficient to prevent
dirt, crowding, scolding, miserable meals, and an incessant atmosphere
of warm soapsuds.

Presently she outraged her father by going into "Delphine's" millinery
store. Delphine was really a stout, bleached woman named Lizzie Clarke,
whose reputation was not quite good, although nobody knew anything
definite against her. She had a double store on Market Street near
Eleventh, a dreary place, with dusty models in the windows, torn
Nottingham curtains draped behind them, and "Delphine" scrawled in gold
across the dusty windows in front. Emeline used to wonder, in the days
when she and her giggling associates passed "Delphine's" window, who
ever bought the dreadful hats in the left-hand window, although they
admitted a certain attraction on the right. Here would be a sign: "Any
Hat in this Window, Two Dollars," surrounded by cheap, dust-grained
felts, gaudily trimmed, or coarse straws wreathed with cotton flowers.
Once or twice Emeline and her friends went in, and one day when a card
in the window informed the passers-by that an experienced saleslady was
wanted, the girl, sick of the situation at home and longing for novelty,
boldly applied