The Calligan family consisted of Mrs. Katharine Calligan, the mother, a dressmaker by profession and a widow—­her husband, a house-mover by trade, having been killed by a falling wall some ten years before—­and Mamie, her twenty-three-year-old daughter.  They lived in a small two-story brick house in Cherry Street, near Fifteenth.  Mrs. Calligan was not a very good dressmaker, not good enough, at least, for the Butler family to patronize in their present exalted state.  Aileen went there occasionally for gingham house-dresses, underwear, pretty dressing-gowns, and alterations on some of her more important clothing which was made by a very superior modiste in Chestnut Street.  She visited the house largely because she had gone to school with Mamie at St. Agatha’s, when the outlook of the Calligan family was much more promising.  Mamie was earning forty dollars a month as the teacher of a sixth-grade room in one of the nearby public schools, and Mrs. Calligan averaged on the whole about two dollars a day—­sometimes not so much.  The house they occupied was their own, free and clear, and the furniture which it contained suggested the size of their joint income, which was somewhere near eighty dollars a month.

Mamie Calligan was not good-looking, not nearly as good-looking as her mother had been before her.  Mrs. Calligan was still plump, bright, and cheerful at fifty, with a fund of good humor.  Mamie was somewhat duller mentally and emotionally.  She was serious-minded—­made so, perhaps, as much by circumstances as by anything else, for she was not at all vivid, and had little sex magnetism.  Yet she was kindly, honest, earnest, a good Catholic, and possessed of that strangely excessive ingrowing virtue which shuts so many people off from the world—­a sense of duty.  To Mamie Calligan duty (a routine conformity to such theories and precepts as she had heard and worked by since her childhood) was the all-important thing, her principal source of comfort and relief; her props in a queer and uncertain world being her duty to her Church; her duty to her school; her duty to her mother; her duty to her friends, etc.  Her mother often wished for Mamie’s sake that she was less dutiful and more charming physically, so that the men would like her.

In spite of the fact that her mother was a dressmaker, Mamie’s clothes never looked smart or attractive—­she would have felt out of keeping with herself if they had.  Her shoes were rather large, and ill-fitting; her skirt hung in lifeless lines from her hips to her feet, of good material but seemingly bad design.  At that time the colored “jersey,” so-called, was just coming into popular wear, and, being close-fitting, looked well on those of good form.  Alas for Mamie Calligan!  The mode of the time compelled her to wear one; but she had neither the arms nor the chest development which made this garment admirable.  Her hat, by choice, was usually a pancake affair with a long, single feather, which somehow never seemed to be in exactly the right position, either to her hair or her face.  At most times she looked a little weary; but she was not physically weary so much as she was bored.  Her life held so little of real charm; and Aileen Butler was unquestionably the most significant element of romance in it.