"I don't think I do," said Bert.
"Well, you know those girls that drink and swear and do everything that's bad? You would not have Prin become like one of them?"
"No," said Bert decidedly, "not like one of them noisy, rough girls. Is it sin to drink, then?"
"Oh, don't ask me!" exclaimed Mrs. Kay, with sudden and unreasonable impatience. "You should go to Sunday-school if you want to know about such things."
And she slammed her door in Bert's face.
He retreated, wondering how he had made her so angry. He could not know the power his words had to sting her.
There had been a time when Mrs. Kay had been far from thinking of herself as a sinner. In the home of her childhood, away in the north of Scotland, she had received a religious training. No child could repeat more promptly the answers in the Catechism, or had a better knowledge of Bible history. As she grew up, the minister found her the most satisfactory scholar belonging to his "kirk." In those days she could have explained glibly enough the nature of sin and the remedy God had provided for it. Yet now, in middle life, she was a woman degraded and enslaved by sin, living without hope, and craving only to forget the happier past, having dropped, one by one, all the good habits of her earlier life.
It was through drink that she had begun to go wrong.
"Was it sin to drink?" the boy had asked. Mrs. Kay had no doubt as to the answer to that question.
In simple, boyish fashion, Bert reflected on what Mrs. Kay had said. He had ample time for reflection now, for he was much alone. Naturally it had never occurred to him that he and Prin were surrounded by a moral atmosphere as bad for their souls as the tainted air of the slums was for their bodies. But now there came back to him certain things which he had heard his father say, without at the time comprehending their meaning.