"Mercy!" cried the amazed mother.
"There you are!" retorted the judge. "Let her go into the Army and she takes up smoking. War leads to dissipation—ask any one."
"I must send her some," declared Mrs. Penniman; "or I wonder if she rolls her own?"
"Yes, and pretty soon we'll have the whole house stenched up worse'n what Dave Cowan's pipe does it," grumbled the judge. "The idee of a girl of her years taking up cigarettes! A good thing the country's going dry. Them that smoke usually drink."
"High time the girl had some fun," returned his wife, placidly.
"Needn't be shameless about it," grumbled the judge. "A good woman has to draw the line somewhere."
The unbending moralist later protested that Winona's letters should not be read to her friends. But Mrs. Penniman proved stubborn. She softened no word of Winona's strong language, and she betrayed something like a guilty pride in revealing that her child was now a hopeless tobacco addict.
A month later Winona further harassed the judge.
"'I think only about life and death,'" read Mrs. Penniman, "'and I'm thinking now that the real plan of things is something greater than either of them. It is not rounded out by our dying in the right faith. Somehow it must go on and on, always in struggle and defeat. I used to think, of course, that our religious faith was the only true one, but now I must tell you I don't know what I am.'"
"My Lord!" groaned the horrified judge. "The girl's an atheist! That's what people are when they don't know what they are. First swearing, then smoking cigarettes, now forsaking her religion. Mark my words, she's coming home an abandoned woman!"