of most virulent disapproval.  But she had no more spirituality than a hen.  Her face was as good-humored, and common, and pretty as ever; and she had a fund of not too refined, but always funny, stories to tell Maurice; so he liked her, after a fashion, and she liked him, after a fashion, too, although she was a little afraid of him; his bored preoccupation seemed like sternness to Lily.  “Grouchiness,” she called it; “probably that’s why he don’t take to Jacky,” she thought; “well, it’s lucky he don’t, for he shouldn’t have him!” But as Maurice, on the little porch, said good-by, she really wondered at his queerness in not taking to Jacky, who, grimy and handsome, was sitting on the ground, spooning earth into an empty lard pail.

“Come in out o’ the dirt, Sweety!” Lily called to him.

Jacky rose reluctantly, then stood looking, open-mouthed, at his mother’s visitor.

“Say,” he remarked; “I kin swear.”

“You don’t say so!” said Maurice.

“I kin say ‘dam,’” Jacky announced, gravely.

“You are a great linguist!  Who instructed you in the noble art of profanity?”

“Huh?” said Jacky, shyly.

“Who taught you?”

“Maw,” said Jacky.

Maurice roared; Lily giggled,—­“My soul and body!  Listen to that child!  Jacky, you naughty boy, telling wrong stories.  One of these days I’m going to give you a reg’lar spanking.”  Then she stamped her foot, for Jacky had settled down again in the dust; “Do you hear me?  Come right in out of the dirt!  That’s one on me!” she confessed, laughing:  then added, anxiously:  “Say, Mr. Curtis, I do smack him when he says bad words; honest, I do!  He’s getting a good bringing up, though my mealers spoil him something awful.  But I’d just shake his prayers out of him, if he forgot ’em.”

Maurice, still laughing, said:  “Well, don’t become too proficient, Jacobus.  Good-by,” he said again.  And as he said it, Eleanor, in a trolley car, glanced out of the window and saw him.

“Why, there’s Maurice!” she said; and motioned to the conductor to stop.  Hunting for a cook had brought her to this impossible suburb, where Maurice, no doubt, was trying to buy or sell a house.  “I’ll get out and walk home with him,” she thought, eagerly.  But the car would not stop until the end of the second block, and when she hurried back Maurice had disappeared.  He had either gone off in another direction, or else entered the house; but she could not remember which house!—­those gingerbread tenements were all so much alike that it was impossible to be sure on which of the small porches she had seen her husband, and a fat, common-looking woman, and a child playing in the yard.  All she could do was to wander up and down the block, looking at every front door in the hope that he would appear; as he didn’t, she finally took the next car into town.

“Did you sell the house this afternoon?” she asked Maurice at dinner that night; and he, remembering how part of his afternoon had been spent, said he hadn’t any particular house on the string at the moment.