tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman
bow. You passed her on the street with a surreptitious glance,
though she was well worth looking at-- in her furs and laces and
plumes. She had the only full-length mink coat in our town, and
Ganz's shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the
miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.

Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round
Christmastime, she might have been seen accompanied by some
silent, dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her
dumbly in and out of stores, stopping now and then to admire a
cheap comb or a chain set with flashy imitation stones--or,
queerly enough, a doll with yellow hair and blue eyes and very
pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her appearance in the
stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in the cost
of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and paid
in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She
owned the House with the Closed Shutters, near the freight
depot--did Blanche Devine.

In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She
did not look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much
make-up, and as she passed you caught the oversweet breath of a
certain heavy scent. Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have
made any woman's features look hard; but her plump face, in spite
of its heaviness, wore an expression of good-humored
intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave her somehow a look of
respectability. We do not associate vice with eyeglasses. So in
a large city she would have passed for a well-dressed,
prosperous, comfortable wife and mother who was in danger of