“My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was?  And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all right, though I certainly don’t believe she ought to be allowed to think she can pull the wool over our eyes.  The sooner she’s sent to the school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all and——­Won’t you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I’m sure you won’t mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you think how long I’ve known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear lovely mother when she lived here and—­was that fur cap expensive?  But——­Don’t you think it’s awful, the way folks talk in this town?”

Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer.  Her large face, with its disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled cunningly.  She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed: 

“I just don’t see how folks can talk and act like they do.  You don’t know the things that go on under cover.  This town—­why it’s only the religious training I’ve given Cy that’s kept him so innocent of—­things.  Just the other day——­I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita not knowing anything about it—­though maybe it’s the judgment of God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one boy——­Well, I don’t like to say it, and maybe I ain’t up-to-date, like Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn’t even give names to all sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least one case where Juanita and a boy—­well, they were just dreadful.  And—­and——­Then there’s that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he’s so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer’s wife and——­And this awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and——­”

There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it.

She knew.  She had always happened to be there.  Once, she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple of inches.  Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a Methodist sociable!

“Another thing——­Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I can’t help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all——­”

“Mrs. Bogart!  I’d trust Bea as I would myself!”