A few years after their marriage MacDonald went West, intending to establish himself and then send for Julie, whom he left meanwhile with her sister, the wife of a well-to-do mechanic living in Pullman. His train was wrecked somewhere in Arizona and the ruins took fire. MacDonald was reported among those victims whose bodies were too badly burned for complete identification, and though Julie refused to believe it at first, when the long days brought no tidings she knew in her heart that it was true. She established herself at her old trade in one of the county towns of the Indiana prairie country, where she worked and prospered for three years before John Applegate asked her to marry him. At the convent they had tried to teach her to worship God, but abstractions were not in Julie’s line. Respectability was more tangible than righteousness, and deference to the opinion of the world an idea she could grasp. The worship of appearances came to be Julie’s religion. Nothing could be more respectable than John Applegate, who was a hardware dealer and one of Belleplaine’s leading merchants, and she accepted him with an almost religious enthusiasm. The hardware business in a rich farming country is a good one. And then, in her own very unreasonable way, Julie was fond of Applegate. “A little mouse of a man, yes,” she said to herself, “but such a good little mouse! I’ll have my way with things. When MacDonald was alive he had his way. Now--we’ll see.” As for Applegate, he was just an average, unheroic, common-place man, such stuff as the mass of people are made of. Having decided to remarry for the sake of his children, he committed the not-uncommon inconsistency of choosing a woman who could never be acceptable to them and who suited himself entirely only in certain rare and unreckoning moods which were as remote from the whole trend of his existence as scarlet is from slate-color. But he found this untamed daughter of the people distinctly fascinating, and, with the easy optimism of one whose eyes are blinded by beauty, assured himself that it would come out all right. His little daughter kissed him dutifully and promised to try to be a good girl when he told her he was going to bring a new mamma home, a pretty, jolly mamma, who would be almost a play-mate for her and Teddy, but secretly she felt a prescience that this was not the kind of mamma she wanted. A few weeks after his marriage her father found her one day shaking in a passion of childhood’s bitter, ineffectual tears. With great difficulty he succeeded in getting an explanation. It came in whispers, tremblingly. “Papa, she--she says _bad words_! And this morning Teddy said one too. Oh, Papa”--the sobs broke out afresh--“how can he grow up to be _nice_ and how am I going to get to be a lady--a lady like my own mamma--if nobody shows us how?”