And that made her think of Lester. He had been in her mind more than usual of late, as she had learned more about the lives of the other women employed in the store. She was one of the older employees and almost at once the younger women had leaned on her, turned to her with confidences, and asked her advice as the women of her church had always done. But these were rougher, rawer lives into which she now looked. That haggard-eyed Mrs. Hemp, in the kitchen-ware department, what a horrible picture she had drawn of her relations with her husband. “He’s going with one of the girls in the collar-factory now, Mrs. Knapp. I wouldn’t put up with it a minute if it weren’t for the children. That man was unfaithful to me, Mrs. Knapp, six months after we were married, and my first baby on the way. And it’s been a new girl for him ever since whenever he got tired of the old one.” And Margaret Donahue, she that read novels on the sly, but never would look at a man, what had she said? “They make me sick,” she declared briefly with an expression on her young face which Mrs. Knapp would have given a good deal not to have seen. “I’d no more let a man come near me than a toad. I’ve seen too much of what Papa does to Mama.” And the woman who scrubbed the floors, that evening she had come to beg Mrs. Knapp to let her sleep at the store, under a counter, in the toilet-room, anywhere, so she would not have to go home. “You’re a married woman yourself, Mrs. Knapp,” she had said. “You know what men are like. Judd is in one of his crazy spells! I’m afraid to go home till he gets over it. Honest I am, Mrs. Knapp. Let me stay here! I don’t care where! I’ll sit up all night in a chair if you’ll only let me stay.” Eva had brought her home and let her sleep on a mattress on the floor in her own room. She had felt an immense horrified pity for her; but she had hated her for that phrase, “You are a married woman, Mrs. Knapp. You know what men are like!” Did she think for a minute that Lester Knapp was that kind of a brute! Couldn’t she see by _looking_ at him that he was a million times too fine to ... she hated the woman again to-night as she thought of it, and the thought brought up before her all that Lester had been to her. No woman could have better reason than she to trust the delicacy, the warm loving-heartedness, the self-control, the innate decency of a man. They had been married for fourteen years, and from the sweet, sweet early days of their young honeymoon when, ignorant and innocent both of them, they had stumbled their way towards each other, she had never known a single instant of this poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and hate and endured violence which these other women apparently took for granted as the inevitable relationship of husband and wife. How good Lester had been to her! She had not appreciated it. She had not really thought of it. It had never occurred to her that he might be anything else.