As she grew older and grew prettier, these vague, bright dreams strengthened.  Emeline’s mother was an overworked and shrill-voiced woman, whose personality drove from the Shotwell Street house whatever small comfort poverty and overcrowding and dirt left in it.  She had no personal message for Emeline.  The older woman had never learned the care of herself, her children, her husband, or her house.  She had naturally nothing to teach her daughter.  Emeline’s father occasionally thundered a furious warning to his daughters as to certain primitive moral laws.  He did not tell Emeline and her sisters why they might some day consent to abandon the path of virtue, nor when, nor how.  He never dreamed of winning their affection and confidence, or of selecting their friends, and making home a place to which these friends might occasionally come.  But he was fond of shouting, when Emeline, May, or Stella pinned on their flimsy little hats for an evening walk, that if ever a girl of his made a fool of herself and got into trouble, she need never come near his door again!  Perhaps Emeline and May and Stella felt that the virtuous course, as exemplified by their parents, was not all of roses, either, but they never said so, and always shuddered dutifully at the paternal warning.

School also failed with the education of the inner Emeline, although she moved successfully from a process known as “diagramming” sentences to a serious literary analysis of “Snow-Bound” and “Evangeline,” and passed terrifying examinations in ancient history, geography, and advanced problems in arithmetic.  By the time she left school she was a tall, giggling, black-eyed creature, to be found walking up and down Mission Street, and gossiping and chewing gum on almost any sunny afternoon.  Between her mother’s whining and her father’s bullying, home life was not very pleasant, but at least there was nothing unusual in the situation; among all the girls that Emeline knew there was not one who could go back to a clean room, a hospitable dining-room, a well-cooked and nourishing meal.  All her friends did as she did:  wheedled money for new veils and new shoes from their fathers, helped their mothers reluctantly and scornfully when they must, slipped away to the street as often as possible, and when they were at home, added their complaints and protests to the general unpleasantness.

Had there been anything different before her eyes, who knows what plans for domestic reform might have taken shape in the girl’s plastic brain?  Emeline had never seen one example of real affection and cooperation between mother and daughters, of work quickly and skilfully done and forgotten, of a clean bright house and a blossoming garden; she had never heard a theory otherwise than that she was poor, her friends were poor, her parents were poor, and that born under the wheels of a monstrous social injustice, she might just as well be dirty and discouraged and discontented at once and have done with it, for in