Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in her efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in the colloquial English of her environment.  Together they laboured with Paulina, but with little effect.  She was quite unmoved, because quite unconscious, of moral shock.  It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a little to discover during the progress of her missionary labours that even Anka, of whose goodness she was thoroughly assured, did not appear to share her horror of Paulina’s moral condition.  It was the East meeting the West, the Slav facing the Anglo-Saxon.  Between their points of view stretched generations of moral development.  It was not a question of absolute moral character so much as a question of moral standards.  The vastness of this distinction in standards was beginning to dawn upon Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and she was prepared to view Paulina’s insensibility to moral distinctions in a more lenient light, when a new idea suddenly struck her: 

“But y’re man; how does he stand it?  Tell me that.”

The two Galician women gazed at each other in silence. 
At length Anka replied with manifest reluctance: 

“She got no man here.  Her man in Russia.”

“What!” exclaimed Mrs. Fitzpatrick in a terrible voice.  “An’ do ye mane to say!  An’ that Rosenblatt—­is he not her husband?  Howly Mother of God,” she continued in an awed tone of voice, “an’ is this the woman I’ve been havin’ to do wid!”

The wrath, the scorn, the repulsion in her eyes, her face, her whole attitude, revealed to the unhappy Paulina what no words could have conveyed.  Under her sallow skin the red blood of shame slowly mounted.  At that moment she saw herself and her life as never before.  The wrathful scorn of this indignant woman pierced like a lightning bolt to the depths of her sluggish moral sense and awakened it to new vitality.  For a few moments she stood silent and with face aflame, and then, turning slowly, passed into her house.  It was the beginning of Paulina’s redemption.

CHAPTER III

THE MARRIAGE OF ANKA

The withdrawing of Mrs. Fitzpatrick from Paulina’s life meant a serious diminution in interest for the unhappy Paulina, but with the characteristic uncomplaining patience of her race she plodded on with the daily routine at washing, baking, cleaning, mending, that filled up her days.  There was no break in the unvarying monotony of her existence.  She gave what care she could to the two children that had been entrusted to her keeping, and to her baby.  It was well for her that Irma, whose devotion to the infant became an absorbing passion, developed a rare skill in the care of the child, and it was well for them all that the ban placed by Mrs. Fitzpatrick upon Paulina’s house was withdrawn as far as Irma and the baby were concerned, for every day the little maid presented her charge to the wise and watchful scrutiny of Mrs. Fitzpatrick.