It should be said for Jennie Follett that, in the matter of her course toward Bob Collingham, she had few of those convictions of sin and righteousness which restrain a proportion of mankind. As with the other members of her family, her conduct followed certain lines "because she couldn’t help it." That is as far as her analysis would have carried her, though analysis didn’t give her much concern. Having so much to do to get food and clothes, the higher laws were outside her sphere of interest. Her chief law was Necessity, and it covered so much ground that there was little place for any other law. It may be well to state here that the Folletts belonged to that vast American contingent who have practically no religion. They had had a religion in Canada, where they had attended the church of a local god who seemed to hold no sway over the United States. They never found that church in the suburbs of New York, or, if they found it nominally, it didn’t, in their opinion, "seem the same." There were no local suasions and compulsions to bring them to its doors, and so, after a few spasmodic efforts to re-establish the connection, they gave up the attempt. Perhaps this failure was due to the fact that, in the depths of her strong, proud heart, Lizzie didn’t believe in God. Josiah did—or, at least, he had believed in him up to the time of being thrown upon the scrap heap. But Lizzie’s faith in God had died with the dying of her faith in man. She had never said so, because she kept her deeper thoughts to herself; but along these lines her influence on her children had been negative. So Jennie had missed those counsels to do right which sometimes form a part of domestic education. With so little latitude for doing anything, there was not—apart from the grosser vices—much latitude in the Follett family even for doing wrong. They did what they "couldn’t help" doing, and there was an end of it. A kind of inborn rectitude kept them from offenses of which the public would have taken note, but behind it there was little in the way of principle. Jennie went to her farewell meeting with Bob untroubled by qualms of conscience. Even if scruples had worried her, they would have been allayed by the knowledge, imparted by Bob’s own mother, that he had done her a great injury. He made the same kind of love to every girl he had known for an hour, and forgot her the next day. "One of these days," the mother had said, "some girl would catch him, and then he would be sorry." A girl hadn’t caught him in this case, but he had caught a girl, and didn’t know what to do with her. Having compelled her to go through a form of marriage—it was no more than a form—he was sailing off to the ends of the world, leaving her not so much as the protection of his name. She owed him nothing; and only the goodness of his angel mother was making up for what he owed to her.