them an opposite example, and the social worker would help her to reunite her household.
The change which took place in Mrs. Quinn was almost immediate. In two weeks her clothes and person were clean and she had made a beginning of furbishing her rooms. The habit of lying was not so easily broken, but she now attempted to meet life squarely. At the end of three months, the social worker felt that enough progress had been made to justify her in reëstablishing Mrs. Quinn in a house, but instead of returning all the children to her immediately, she arranged to have them restored, one at a time. Thus each child which Mrs. Quinn won back was an incentive to her to work the harder to make of herself the sort of mother she ought to be, and by the time the family was reunited, Mrs. Quinn had begun to prefer cleanliness for its own sake and to see that it was possible to be happy and still tell the truth.
Undoubtedly, the personality and influence of the social worker had much to do with this change, but what started it and gave it impetus was Mrs. Quinn's determination to win back her children. The real skill of the social worker lay in her perception that out of the crisis that had come into Mrs. Quinn's life a goal for her activities might be
