Lillian was determined. When May went indoors and up the stairway to her room above she followed to the foot of the stairs and finished what she felt she had to say. “I don’t want you to do it, May,” she said, “I don’t want you to do it. I want to see there be one Edgley that goes straight but if you intend to go crooked don’t be a fool. Don’t take up with a cheap one, like Jerome Hadley, who just give you soft talk. If you are going to do it anyway you just come to me. I’ll get you in with men who have money and I’ll fix it so you don’t have no trouble. If you’re going to go on the turf, like Kate and I did, don’t be a fool. You just come to me.” * * * * * In all her life May had never achieved a friendship with another woman, although often she had dreamed of such a possibility. When she was still a school girl she saw other girls going homeward in the evening. They loitered along, their arms linked, and how much they had to say to each other. When they came to a corner, where their ways parted, they could not bear to leave each other. “You go a piece with me tonight and tomorrow night I’ll go a piece with you,” one of them said. May hurried homeward alone, her heart filled with envy, and after she had finished her time in the school and, more than ever after the incident in the berry field—always spoken of by Lillian as the time of her troubles—the dream of a possible friendship with some other woman grew more intense. During the summer of that last year of her life in Bidwell a young woman from another town moved into a house on her street. Her father had a job on the Nickel Plate Railroad and Bidwell was at the end of a section of that road. The railroad man was seldom at home, his wife had died a few months before and his daughter, whose name was Maud, was not well and did not go about town with the other young women. Every afternoon and evening she sat on the front porch of her father’s house, and May, who was sometimes compelled to go to one of the stores, often saw her sitting there. The newcomer in Bidwell was tall and slender and looked like an invalid. Her cheeks were pale and she looked tired. During the year before she had been operated upon and some part of her internal machinery had been taken away and her paleness and the look of weariness on her face, touched May’s heart. “She looks as though she might be wanting company,” she thought hopefully.