school and she's clerking in a downtown store. That is slow going for
Peggy, so she evens things up by attending the Saturday night dances.
When she's whirling around the hall on the tips of her toes, she really
feels like herself. She gets home about two in the morning on these
occasions and finds her mother waiting up for her and kneeling before a
little statue of the Virgin that stands in the corner of the
sitting-room. As soon as the mother sees Peggy, she pounces on her and
weeps on her shoulder, and after Peggy's in bed and dead with the tire
in her legs, her mother gets down beside the bed and prays some more.
'What would you do, please,' says Peggy to me, 'if you had a mother that
kept crying and praying every time you had a bit of fun? Wouldn't you
run away from home and get where they took things aisier?'"

David threw back his head and roared in sympathetic commendation of
Peggy's point of view.

"Poor little mother," sighed Honora. "I suppose she'll send her girl
straight on the road to perdition and never know what did it."

"Not if I can help it," said Kate. "I don't believe in letting her go to
perdition at all. I went around to see the mother and I put the
responsibility on her. 'Every time you make Peggy laugh,' I said, 'you
can count it for glory. Every time you make her swear,--for she does
swear,--you can know you've blundered. Why don't you give her some
parties if you don't want her to be going out to them?'"

"How did she take that?" asked Honora.

"It bothered her a good deal at first, but when I went down to meet
Peggy the other day as she came out of the store, she told me her mother