Almost at once Katie began to treat Marie as her ward. She took her side against her mistress, when the latter scolded the girl on account of her indolence or slowness. "Marie is so young," she would say, "almost a child; and we ought to go easy on her." She also looked after Marie's morals and tried to prevent her being out late at night. This kind of care had its amusing side, as Katie herself was none too strict about herself in this regard. For instance, Katie fancied the butcher's boy who used to come to the kitchen every day with meat. He was only sixteen, and quite inexperienced in the ways of the world. "I did him no harm," said Katie. "But I taught him everything there was to know. My life was so monotonous and I worked so hard then that I had to have him. I absolutely had to, but I think I did him no harm and he was certainly my salvation. But I didn't let Marie know anything about it. She was too young. When she found out, years afterwards, she was quite cross with me about it." This kind of relation existed between Katie and Marie for several years. About the time the girl went to Kenilworth and had her idyllic experience, Katie married. Nick was a good sort of a man, easy and happy, and a sober and constant labourer. Katie had saved some money, in her careful German way, had even a bank-account of several hundred dollars. It was not an exciting marriage; neither of them was very young or very much in love, at least Katie was not, but it was a good marriage of convenience, so to speak, and it might have lasted if it had not been, as we shall see, for Marie, and Katie's affection for her. When Marie started in on her career of wildness, Katie and Nick, her husband, had a little home together. Into this home Marie was always welcomed by Katie, but Nick was not so cordial. They knew about the girl's looseness, and in their tolerant Southern German way, they did not so much mind that, and Katie was distinctly sympathetic: Marie was old enough now, she thought. But Nick did not like the hold the girl had on Katie's affection. "You'll leave me for her, sometime," he would say to his wife, ominously. Katie would laugh and call him an old fool. She couldn't foresee the circumstances that would one day realise her husband's fears. It was about this time that Marie met the man who has influenced her more deeply than anyone else or anything else in her life, who gave her a social philosophy, though to be sure what would seem to most people a thoroughly perverse and subversive social philosophy; but by means of which she had a social background, and a saving justification--was saved from being a mere outcast.