It began as soon as she could see daylight to light the fire by. In
winter the day began in her dark, cold kitchen long before the sun
started his fire on the eastern hills.

She upheld a standard of morals as high as Mount Everest and as bleak.
She made home a region of everlasting chores, rebukes, sayings wiser
than tender, complaints and bitter criticisms of husband, children,
merchants, neighbors, weather, prices, fabrics--of everything on
earth but of nothing in heaven.

Strange to say, the children did not appreciate the advantages
of their life. The boys had begun to earn their own money early by
the splitting of wood and the shoveling of snow, by the vending of
soap, and the conduct of delivery-wagons. They spent their evenings
at pool-tables or on corners. The elder girls had accepted positions
in the various emporia of the village as soon as they could. They
counted the long hours of the shop life as an escape from worse.
Their free evenings were not devoted to self-improvement. They
did not turn out to be really very good girls. They were up to all
sorts of village mischief and shabby frivolity. Their poor mother
could not account for it. She could scold them well, but she could
not scold them good.

The daughter on the train, the youngest--named Kedzie after an aunt
who was the least poor of the relatives--was just growing up into
a similar career. Her highest prayer was that her path might lead
her to a clerkship in a candy-shop. Then this miracle! Her father
announced that he was going to New York.

Adna was always traveling on the railroad, but he had never traveled