"Why, Peggy Raymond, I didn't suppose anybody lived over there."
"Lots of people do. Scads of 'em."
"I didn't mean that, Peggy. Of course, I meant the kind of people one goes to see.
"I never went to see these people before," Peggy admitted. "But I've wanted to ever since the night of the Bazar. That boy, you know--"
"O, the ice cream boy! Was he a Dunn?"
"Jimmy Dunn. I saw him on the street the other day, and asked him where he lived. He's an awful little rag-bag, and Graham Wylie calls him all sorts of names, but there's something about him I can't help liking. And I thought I'd see what sort of woman his mother was. Sometimes we have an extra woman in to scrub, at house-cleaning time, though I must say," Peggy concluded thoughtfully, "that judging from Jimmy, she wouldn't be much of a success as a scrubber."
"I'll go with you," Priscilla said, taking Peggy's arm. "It isn't a suitable neighborhood for you to go alone." Now that she had learned that Peggy was not planning to call upon Elaine, Priscilla's mood had become extremely affectionate. She pressed the arm she held. She complimented the way Peggy was doing her hair. While she did not acknowledge to herself that her impulse to be agreeable had its root in the knowledge that she had just been very disagreeable, Peggy recognized her friend's unusual demonstrativeness as an effort at atonement, and she met her half way.
An idealist of the most pronounced type must have christened Glen Echo Avenue. The objects on the landscape most closely resembling glens, were the grimy coal-sheds along the track, while it would have been hard for a professional riddle-guesser to say why the little twisting, squalid street should have been dignified with the name of avenue. A goat, with oblique, uncanny eyes, occupied apparently in the mastication of a paper bag, gazed at the girls as they passed, and swarms of dirty children paused in their play to take stock of the strangers.
"Does Mrs. Dunn live anywhere around here?" Peggy inquired, addressing a curly-haired little girl with enormous black eyes, and gold rings in her ears. Another girl, with fiery red hair, pushed forward.
"Mary can't understand English,": she explained importantly. "She's a dago and her folks ain't been here long. Who are you looking for?"