But it was the girl’s lips that were speaking, and the lips were sweetly saying: “How right you are, Papa! Isn’t it disgusting and absurd, in a town where there is as much money and as many comfortable people as there are in this town, that any child should be started to school so thinly clad that her teeth are chattering and her hands blue and stiff?” Mahlon tried to recover some least degree of his lost attitude. “That girl’s father never did an honest day’s work in his life.” He tried to thunder it; he did succeed in making it impressive. “That’s exactly the truth,” agreed Mahala instantly. “He never did, he never will. That’s the reason why every one should make a point of seeing that Susanna has warm and comfortable clothing until she can get enough education so that she will be able to teach or do something that will help out her mother and her little brothers and sisters. I was just coming to you about it when Mother came to my room to suggest that I talk it over with you. I want you to tell about Susanna at the next board meeting of the church. I want you to tell those people plainly how narrow-minded and how selfish they are and what a disgrace it is to the whole town to have a member of their church trying to go to high school so thinly clad that she is stiff and blue—and she is one of the very best scholars in our class, too. Mind, I have to study good and hard to keep ahead of her and once or twice, I wouldn’t have had my problems if she had not held up her slate and let me see how to begin a solution. I owe her that petticoat all right, Father.” Mahlon Spellman stood very still. He wanted to say something scathing. He had intended to be extremely severe about his daughter doing such an unprecedented thing as to remove her petticoat on the street. He wanted to tell her that she should be ashamed to accept help from anything so low down in the social world as a Susanna. But some way, memory performed a kaleidoscopic jump, so that he saw himself in crucial moments looking anxiously toward the slate of some of his fellow pupils. Then it struck Mahlon like a blow that he never, in his life before, had admitted even to himself that he had done this; but Mahala was facing him with perfectly frank eyes, acknowledging her obligations. What he said was not in the very least what he had contemplated saying. “The next time you feel that you owe any one a petticoat, come and tell _me_,” he said. “There are some suitable ones of heavy stamped felt in dark colours that many of the girls of Susanna’s age and size are wearing. It is scarcely fair to your mother that hours of painstaking work she has spent upon you, in an effort to express her love for you, should be discarded by you without a thought of her.” Mahala’s eager face showed deep concentration.