Her arms were aching and she moved the heavy baby from one shoulder to the other.

“A game, is it?” asked the Irish girl.  “And who wins?”

“The children, I hope.  I’m on the side of the children first and last.”

“Oh, so am I. I think it’s just magnificent of you to help them.”

Kate disclaimed the magnificence.

“You mustn’t forget that I’m doing it for money,” she said.  “It’s my job.  I hope I’ll do it well enough to win the reputation of being honest, but you mustn’t think there’s anything saintly about me, because there isn’t.  Good-bye.  Hold on tight, children!”

She nodded cheerfully and moved on, fresh, strong, determined, along the crowded thoroughfare, the people making way for her smilingly.  She saw nothing of the attention paid her.  She was wondering if her arms would hold out or if, in some unguarded moment, the baby would slip from them.  Perhaps the baby was fearful, too, for it reached up its little clawlike hands and clasped her tight about the neck.  Kate liked the feeling of those little hands, and was sorry when they relaxed and the weary little one fell asleep.

Each day brought new problems.  If she could have decided these by mere rule of common sense, her new vocation might not have puzzled her as much as it did.  But it was uncommon, superfine, intuitive sense that was required.  She discovered, for example, that not only was sin a virtue in disguise, but that a virtue might be degraded into a sin.

She put this case to Honora and David one evening as the three of them sat in Honora’s drawing-room.

“It’s the case of Peggy Dunn,” she explained.  “Peggy likes life.  She has brighter eyes than she knows what to do with and more smiles than she has a chance to distribute.  She has finished her course at the parochial school and she’s clerking in a downtown store.  That is slow going for Peggy, so she evens things up by attending the Saturday night dances.  When she’s whirling around the hall on the tips of her toes, she really feels like herself.  She gets home about two in the morning on these occasions and finds her mother waiting up for her and kneeling before a little statue of the Virgin that stands in the corner of the sitting-room.  As soon as the mother sees Peggy, she pounces on her and weeps on her shoulder, and after Peggy’s in bed and dead with the tire in her legs, her mother gets down beside the bed and prays some more.  ‘What would you do, please,’ says Peggy to me, ’if you had a mother that kept crying and praying every time you had a bit of fun?  Wouldn’t you run away from home and get where they took things aisier?’”

David threw back his head and roared in sympathetic commendation of Peggy’s point of view.

“Poor little mother,” sighed Honora.  “I suppose she’ll send her girl straight on the road to perdition and never know what did it.”