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own way, if ye will. Ye must go, though, willy-nilly. It can't be any other way. I wish to God it
could."
Aileen went out, very solemn, and Butler went over to his desk and sat down. "Such a situation!"
he said to himself. Such a complication!"
Chapter XXXVIII
The situation which confronted Aileen was really a trying one. A girl of less innate courage and
determination would have weakened and yielded. For in spite of her various social connections
and acquaintances, the people to whom Aileen could run in an emergency of the present kind
were not numerous. She could scarcely think of any one who would be likely to take her in for
any lengthy period, without question. There were a number of young women of her own age,
married and unmarried, who were very friendly to her, but there were few with whom she was
really intimate. The only person who stood out in her mind, as having any real possibility of
refuge for a period, was a certain Mary Calligan, better known as "Mamie" among her friends,
who had attended school with Aileen in former years and was now a teacher in one of the local
schools.
The Calligan family consisted of Mrs. Katharine Calligan, the mother, a dressmaker by
profession and a widow--her husband, a house-mover by trade, having been killed by a falling
wall some ten years before--and Mamie, her twenty-three-year-old daughter. They lived in a
small two-story brick house in Cherry Street, near Fifteenth. Mrs. Calligan was not a very good
dressmaker, not good enough, at least, for the Butler family to patronize in their present exalted
state. Aileen went there occasionally for gingham house-dresses, underwear, pretty dressing-
gowns, and alterations on some of her more important clothing which was made by a very
superior modiste in Chestnut Street. She visited the house largely because she had gone to
school with Mamie at St. Agatha's, when the outlook of the Calligan family was much more
promising. Mamie was earning forty dollars a month as the teacher of a sixth-grade room in one
of the nearby public schools, and Mrs. Calligan averaged on the whole about two dollars a
day--sometimes not so much. The house they occupied was their own, free and clear, and the
furniture which it contained suggested the size of their joint income, which was somewhere near
eighty dollars a month.
Mamie Calligan was not good-looking, not nearly as good-looking as her mother had been
before her. Mrs. Calligan was still plump, bright, and cheerful at fifty, with a fund of good humor.
Mamie was somewhat duller mentally and emotionally. She was serious-minded-- made so,
perhaps, as much by circumstances as by anything else, for she was not at all vivid, and had
little sex magnetism. Yet she was kindly, honest, earnest, a good Catholic, and possessed of
that strangely excessive ingrowing virtue which shuts so many people off from the world--a
sense of duty. To Mamie Calligan duty (a routine conformity to such theories and precepts as
she had heard and worked by since her childhood) was the all-important thing, her principal
source of comfort and relief; her props in a queer and uncertain world being her duty to her
Church; her duty to her school; her duty to her mother; her duty to her friends, etc. Her mother
often wished for Mamie's sake that she was less dutiful and more charming physically, so that
the men would like her.
In spite of the fact that her mother was a dressmaker, Mamie's clothes never looked smart or
attractive--she would have felt out of keeping with herself if they had. Her shoes were rather
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