Such an instance of compunction was recently brought to my attention when Hull-House made an effort to place a subnormal little girl twelve years old in an institution in order that she might be protected from certain designing men in the neighborhood. The grandmother who had always taken care of her savagely opposed the effort step by step. She had scrubbed the lavatories in a public building during the twenty-five years of her widowhood, and because she worked all day had been unable to protect her own feeble-minded daughter who, when barely fifteen years old, had become the mother of this child. When her granddaughter was finally placed in the institution, the old woman was absolutely desolated. She found it almost impossible to return home after her day’s work because “it was too empty and lonesome, and nothing to come back for. You see,” she explained, “my youngest boy wasn’t right in his head either and kept his bed for the last fifteen years of his life. During all that time I took care of him the way one does of a baby, and I hurried home every night with my heart in my mouth until I saw that he was all right. He died the year this little girl was born and she kind of took his place. I kept her in a day nursery while she was little, and when she was seven years old the ladies there sent her to school in one of the subnormal rooms and let her come back to the nursery for her meals. I thought she was getting along all right and I took care never to let her go near her mother.” The old woman made it quite clear that this was because her daughter was keeping house with a man with whom there had been no marriage ceremony. In her simple code, to go to such a house would be to connive at sin, and while she was grateful that the man had established a control over her daughter which she herself had never been able to obtain, she always referred to her daughter as “fallen,” although no one knew better than she how unguarded the girl had been. As I saw how singularly free this mother was from self-reproach and how untouched by any indecisions or remorses for the past, I was once more impressed by the strength of the stout habits acquired by those who early become accustomed to fight off black despair. Such habits stand them in good stead in old age, and at least protect them from those pensive regrets and inconsolable sorrows which inevitably tend to surround whatever has once made for early happiness, as soon as it has ceased to exist.