In this story by Katherine Porter, the unnamed main character is a young woman who has a very nice purse that everyone envies; it is her most valuable possession because it was a gift from a friend.  Everyone in this story is very poor, which gives the moral of the story even greater meaning.  When the young woman puts her purse down in her room, the cleaning lady comes in to clean her room, but when the girl returns her purse is gone.  She confronts the janitor, who admits that she stole it so that she could give it to her niece for her seventeenth birthday and reluctantly gives it back to the girl.  When the main character, the young woman, decides to let the janitor can keep the purse, the janitor says that she doesn’t want it now because she can get something better for her nieces.  The tone of the story is ironic, showing how the janitor wanted the purse if she could steal it, but didn’t want it when it was given to her.  The story looks into the ontological questions “how important is money, is truth absolute or relative, and is a person inherently good, bad, or both?”