depths in them. Nature had finished her very delicately, very lovingly one might almost say. Softly-tinted, rounded, appealing, she stood before me with the mien and instincts of a lady plainly marked, self-unconscious, asking only the barest terms of existence for herself and the babies in the cold, disordered room she called home. Oh, yes, undoubtedly she had made a mess of her life. She didn't blink the fact.
"I suppose we didn't realize what we were doing, either of us. He was only twenty-one and I was eighteen. That was six years ago. We should have waited, but we didn't know any better. He was impatient."
Again the leaf was turned and Mrs. Porter vanished on the other side of it. Regrets and heart-ache went with her. Regrets don't do much good in this world, but it would be a stony heart that was without them where Laundry Ladies are concerned.
It was some satisfaction to me to know that before Mrs. Porter entirely disappeared from the horizon, others, more influential than I, or more leisured, or both, had espoused her cause in a practical way that eliminated from my consciousness the peace-destroying pictures
