lips jerking.

Sometimes Margery would talk to her a little about Jack Williams--or,
rather, she would listen while Susan talked. Then Susan would cry, large,
slow-rolling tears slipping down her cheeks.

"I don't know how--how it happened like this," she would say. "It seems
like a kind o' awful dream. I don't know nothin'. He was common--just
like I am--an' he didn't know much; but it didn't seem like he was a bad
feller--an' I do b'lieve he liked me. _Seemed_ like he did, anyways. They
say he's got a splendid job in Chicago. He won't never know nothin' about
what happens."

Margery did not leave her unprovided for when she went to Boston. It cost
very little to keep her for a few months in her small room. The people of
the house promised to be decently kind to her. Margery had only been away
from home two weeks when the child was born. The hysterical paroxysms and
violent outbreaks of grief its mother had passed through, her convulsive
writhings and clutchings and beating of her head against the walls had
distorted and exhausted the little creature. The women who were with her
said its body looked as if it were bruised in spots all over, and there
was a purple mark on its temple. It breathed a few times and died.

"Good thing, too!" said the women. "There's too many in the world that's
got a right here. It'd hev' had to go to ruin."

"Good thing for _it_," said Susan, weakly but sullenly, from her bed;
"but if it's God as makes 'em, how did He come to go to the trouble of
making this one an' sendin' it out, if it hadn't no right to come? He
_does_ make 'em all, doesn't he? You wouldn't darst to say He
didn't--you, Mrs. Hopp, that's a church member!" And her white face
actually drew itself into a ghastly, dreary grin. "Lawsy! He's kept
pretty busy!"

When she was able to stand on her feet she went back to the mill. She was
a good worker, and hands were needed. The girls and women fought shy of
her, and she had no chance of enjoying any young pleasures or comforts,
even if she had not been too much broken on the rack of the misery of the
last year to have energy to desire them. No young man wanted to be seen
talking to her, no young woman cared to walk with her in the streets. She
always went home to her room alone, and sat alone, and thought of what
had happened to her, trying to explain to herself how it had happened and
why it had turned out that she was worse than any other girl. She had
never felt like a bad