“You couldn’t blame me for taking the chance when I had it,” he said laughing. He explained in detail what had occurred in the wood, while other young men stood about filled with envy. As he talked he grew both proud and a little ashamed of the public attention his adventure was attaining. “It was easy,” he said. “That May Edgley’s the easiest thing that ever lived in this town. A fellow don’t have to ask to get what he wants. That’s how easy it is.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II IN Bidwell, and after she had fairly flung herself against the wall of village convention by going into the wood with Jerome, May lived at home, doing the work her mother had formerly done in the Edgley household. She washed the clothes, cooked the food and made the beds. There was, for the time, something sweet to her in the thoughts of doing lowly tasks and she washed and ironed the dresses in which Lillian and Kate were to array themselves and the heavy overalls worn by her father and brothers with a kind of satisfaction in the task. “It makes me tired and I can sleep and won’t be thinking,” she told herself. As she worked over the washtubs, among the beds soiled by the heavy slumbers of her brothers who on the evening before had perhaps come home drunk, or stood over the hot stove in the kitchen, she kept thinking of her dead mother. “I wonder what she would think,” she asked herself and then added. “If she hadn’t died it wouldn’t have happened. If I had someone, I could go to and talk with, things would be different.”