Kern deplored the doctor’s thinness, and hardly less, in her secret heart, his strange indifference to his personal appearance.  She observed to her mommer that she never see a gempman go so shabby.  She longed to admonish Mr. V.V. on some of these matters, but on the whole hardly saw her way clear.  However, it is possible to do a thing or two by indirection in this world, as one half the race has had gone reason to learn.  And one sultry night in mid-July, the little buncher seemed able to talk of nothing but the astonishing suit Jem Noonan had just obtained at the One-Price Outfitting Company for the somewhat laughable sum of $7.90.  A three-piece Prince serge, warranted fast, with the English shoulders and high-cut vest, which only last week had been $15, for Jem had seen it in the window with his own eyes, but had waited around, knowing that the Mid-Summer Stock Rejuicing Sales were now about due.  Such a Chance Would Not Soon Occur Again:  so it said on the card in the window, and so Didymus himself would have believed, hearing Kern Garland’s abandoned eulogies....

And, sure enough, Mr. V.V., at length fired out of his purely civil interest, was visited with a brilliant association of ideas, as his eye betrayed.  It was a matter, it will be remembered, which he had always meant to take up some day.

“Did you say the One-Price,” he inquired, not without an inner sense of cleverness and enterprise, “or was it the Globe?”

Kern’s heart thrilled.  She was a woman, and hence the mother of all men.  And this, of course, was the moment to introduce quite simply, the subject of the Genuine Mouldform Garments like the pixtures in the magazines, $15, rejuiced from as high as $28.50, and would look, oh, so fine and stylish long after the Prince serge had worn slick and faded....

“But I thought you spoke of the Prince as something especially fine,” said Mr. V.V., with rather a long face for the way expenses seemed to be mounting up.

“Fine for on’y a carpenter, oh, yes,” said Kern, “but not hardly what you’d recmend to a doctor, oh, no.”

The young man said ruefully that perhaps he had better investigate the One-Price bargains, before Jem Noonan gobbled them all up.  Then his eyes rested on Kern across the table, and the light of enterprise died out of them....

To take this child away from the Heth Works would be easy, indeed, but what to do with her then?  That was a question which money could not answer.  Kern’s education had stopped at twelve.  She was nineteen years old, born to work, and qualified to do nothing in the world but make cheroots.

After all, could anything more suitable happen to her than that she should take a fancy to Jem Noonan, the upstanding, square-jawed, taciturn youth who had appeared at the Dabney House in his Sunday blacks one night in May, and had reappeared regularly once a week since?  Noonan was master of his trade at twenty-one, a lodge man, an attendant at ward meetings, and laying by money to embark as a contractor; he bade fair to be a power some day.  And, though he seemed to be almost completely dumb, there must be something uncommon in him that he should be so drawn to the gay, dreaming little creature who was so clearly made of other clay than his....