ist in a corn-factor's office but, as a
disreputable sheriff's man used to come every other day to the office,
asking to be allowed to say a word to his daughter, she had taken her
daughter home again and set her to do housework. As Polly was very
lively the intention was to give her the run of the young men. Besides
young men like to feel that there is a young woman not very far away.
Polly, of course, flirted with the young men but Mrs. Mooney, who was a
shrewd judge, knew that the young men were only passing the time away:
none of them meant business. Things went on so for a long time and Mrs.
Mooney began to think of sending Polly back to typewriting when she
noticed that something was going on between Polly and one of the young
men. She watched the pair and kept her own counsel.

Polly knew that she was being watched, but still her mother's persistent
silence could not be misunderstood. There had been no open complicity
between mother and daughter, no open understanding but, though people
in the house began to talk of the affair, still Mrs. Mooney did not
intervene. Polly began to grow a little strange in her manner and the
young man was evidently perturbed. At last, when she judged it to be the
right moment, Mrs. Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a
cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.

It was a bright Sunday morning of early summer, promising heat, but with
a fresh breeze blowing. All the windows of the boarding house were open
and the lace curtains ballooned gently towards the street beneath the
raised sashes. The belfry of George's Church sent out constant peals and
worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus before
the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained demeanour
no less than by the little volumes in their gloved hands. Breakfast
was over in the boarding house and the table of the breakfast-room was
covered with plates on which lay yellow streaks of eggs with morsels
of bacon-fat and bacon-rind. Mrs. Mooney sat in the straw arm-chair
and watched the servant Mary remove the breakfast things. She mad Mary
collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help to make Tuesday's
bread-pudding. When the table was cleared, the broken bread collected,
the sugar and butter safe under lock and key, she began to reconstruct
the interview which she had had the night before with Polly. Things were
as she had suspected: she had been frank