“I get you, all right!” she cried.  “I guess I know what’s eatin’ you!  You’ve got money to burn and you’re sore because I spend mine to buy what I need.  You don’t know how to dress yourself any more than one of them Polak girls in the mills, and you don’t want anybody else to look nice.”

And Janet was impelled to make a retort of almost equal crudity:—­“If I were a man and saw you in those clothes I wouldn’t wait for an introduction.  You asked me what I thought.  I don’t care about the money!” she exclaimed passionately.  “I’ve often told you you were pretty enough without having to wear that kind of thing—­to make men stare at you.”

“I want to know if I don’t always look like a lady!  And there’s no man living would try to pick me up more than once.”  The nasal note in Lise’s voice had grown higher and shriller, she was almost weeping with anger.  “You want me to go ‘round lookin’ like a floorwasher.”

“I’d rather look like a floorwasher than—­than another kind of woman,” Janet declared.

“Well, you’ve got your wish, sweetheart,” said Lise.  “You needn’t be scared anybody will pick you up.”

“I’m not,” said Janet....

This quarrel had taken place a week or so before Janet’s purchase of the stove.  Hannah, too, was outraged by Lise’s costume, and had also been moved to protest; futile protest.  Its only effect on Lise was to convince her of the existence of a prearranged plan of persecution, to make her more secretive and sullen than ever before.

“Sometimes I just can’t believe she’s my daughter,” Hannah said dejectedly to Janet when they were alone together in the kitchen after Lise had gone out.  “I’m fond of her because she’s my own flesh and blood—­I’m ashamed of it, but I can’t help it.  I guess it’s what the minister in Dolton used to call a visitation.  I suppose I deserve it, but sometimes I think maybe if your father had been different he might have been able to put a stop to the way she’s going on.  She ain’t like any of the Wenches, nor any of the Bumpuses, so far’s I’m able to find out.  She just don’t seem to have any notion about right and wrong.  Well, the world has got all jumbled up—­it beats me.”

Hannah wrung out the mop viciously and hung it over the sink.

“I used to hope some respectable man would come along, but I’ve quit hopin’.  I don’t know as any respectable man would want Lise, or that I could honestly wish him to have her.”

“Mother!” protested Janet.  Sometimes, in those conversations, she was somewhat paradoxically impelled to defend her sister.

“Well, I don’t,” insisted Hannah, “that’s a fact.  I’ll tell you what she looks like in that hat and cloak—­a bad woman.  I don’t say she is—­I don’t know what I’d do if I thought she was, but I never expected my daughter to look like one.”

“Oh, Lise can take care of herself,” Janet said, in spite of certain recent misgivings.