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 someplace--where
nobody knows her?"

That motion of Alderman Mooney's thumb against the smooth pipe
bowl 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,