Alderman Mooney closed the furnace door with a bang that drowned the rest of the threat.  He turned the draft in a pipe overhead and brushed his sooty palms briskly together like one who would put an end to a profitless conversation.

“She’s bought the house,” he said mildly, “and paid for it.  And it’s hers.  She’s got a right to live in this neighbourhood as long as she acts respectable.”

The Very Young Husband laughed.

“She won’t last!  They never do.”

Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing his thumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes.  On his face was a queer look—­the look of one who is embarrassed because he is about to say something honest.

“Look here!  I want to tell you something:  I happened to be up in the mayor’s office the day Blanche signed for the place.  She had to go through a lot of red tape before she got it—­had quite a time of it, she did!  And say, kid, that woman ain’t so—­bad.”

The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently: 

“Oh, don’t give me any of that, Mooney!  Blanche Devine’s a town character.  Even the kids know what she is.  If she’s got religion or something, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn’t she go to another town—­Chicago or some place—­where nobody knows her?”

That motion of Alderman Mooney’s thumb against the smooth pipebowl stopped.  He looked up slowly.

“That’s what I said—­the mayor too.  But Blanche Devine said she wanted to try it here.  She said this was home to her.  Funny—­ain’t it?  Said she wouldn’t be fooling anybody here.  They know her.  And if she moved away, she said, it’d leak out some way sooner or later.  It does, she said.  Always!  Seems she wants to live like—­well, like other women.  She put it like this:  She says she hasn’t got religion, or any of that.  She says she’s no different than she was when she was twenty.  She says that for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to be able to go into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and, if the clerk charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able to sass him with a regular piece of her mind—­and then sail out and trade somewhere else until he saw that she didn’t have to stand anything from storekeepers, any more than any other woman that did her own marketing.  She’s a smart woman, Blanche is!  She’s saved her money.  God knows I ain’t taking her part—­exactly; but she talked a little, and the mayor and me got a little of her history.”

A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband.  He had been known before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of that seed known as wild oats.  He knew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in spite of his youth!  He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked summer gown on the street.

“Oh, she wasn’t playing for sympathy,” west on Alderman Mooney in answer to the sneer.  “She said she’d always paid her way and always expected to.  Seems her husband left her without a cent when she was eighteen—­with a baby.  She worked for four dollars a week in a cheap eating house.  The two of ’em couldn’t live on that.  Then the baby—­”