I'll furnish the money for her
things, and there'll be enough of them, too." Babe had as useless a
trousseau, and as filled with extravagant pink-and-blue and lacy and
frilly things, as any daughter of doting parents. Jo seemed to find a
grim pleasure in providing them. But it left him pretty well pinched.
After Babe's marriage (she insisted that they call her Estelle now) Jo
sold the house on Calumet. He and Carrie took one of those little
flats that were springing up, seemingly overnight, all through
Chicago's South Side.

There was nothing domestic about Carrie. She had given up teaching two
years before, and had gone into social-service work on the West Side.
She had what is known as a legal mind--hard, clear, orderly--and she
made a great success of it. Her dream was to live at the Settlement
House and give all her time to the work. Upon the little household she
bestowed a certain amount of grim, capable attention. It was the same
kind of attention she would have given a piece of machinery whose
oiling and running had been entrusted to her care. She hated it, and
didn't hesitate to say so.

Jo took to prowling about department-store basements, and household
goods sections. He was always sending home a bargain in a ham, or a
sack of potatoes, or fifty pounds of sugar, or a window clamp, or a new
kind of paring knife. He was forever doing odd jobs that the janitor
should have done. It was the domestic in him claiming its own.

Then, one night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her leathery
cheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve. They had what she called a
plain talk.

"Listen, Jo. They've offered me the job of first assistant resident
worker. And I'm going to take it. Take it! I know fifty other girls
who'd give their ears for it. I go in next month."

They were at dinner. Jo looked up from his plate, dully. Then he
glanced around the little dining room, with its ugly tan walls and its
heavy, dark furniture (the Calumet Avenue pieces fitted cumbersomely
into the five-room flat).

"Away? Away from here, you mean--to live?"

Carrie laid down her fork. "Well, really, Jo! After all that
explanation."

"But to go over there to live! Why, that neighborhood's full of dirt,
and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all. I can't let you
do that, Carrie."

Carrie's chin came up. She laughed a short little laugh. "Let me!
That's eighteenth-century talk, Jo. My life's my own to