lymouth Rock Poetry Guild, at Boston--my slight
remaining ineligibility was tacitly and finally ignored. The old family
friends began to hint that Gertrude, though a splendid woman, had always
been a little austere. Possibly there were faults on both sides. One
never knew.

And it was just at this hour of social reestablishment that my birthday
swung round again, for the thirty-third time, and brought with it a
change in my outer life which was to lead on to even greater changes in
all my modes of thinking and feeling. Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a
four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the
destiny of a luxurious _dilettante_, living at the very center of bonded
respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad
avenue which is right at both ends!

V

"Never in this (obviously outcast) world!" grumbled Bob Blake, bringing
his malletlike fist down on the marble top of the parlor table.

The blow made his half-filled glass jump and clinkle; so he emptied it
slowly, then poured in four fingers more, forgetting to add water this
time, and sullenly pushed the bottle across to Pearl. But Pearl was
fretful. Her watery blue eyes were fixed upon the drumhead of the banjo,
where it hung suspended above the melodeon.

"I did so paint them flowers. And well you know it. What's the good of
bein' so mean? If you wasn't heeled you'd let me have it my way. Didn't
I bring that banjo with me?"

"Hungh! Say you did. What does that prove?"

"I guess it proves somethin', all right."

"Proves you swiped it, likely."

"Me! I ain't that kind, thanks."

"The hell you ain't."

"If you're tryin' to get gay, cut it out!"

"Not me."

"Well, then--quit!"

This was shortly after supper. It was an unusually hot, humid evening;
doors and windows stood open to no purpose; and Susan was sitting out on
the monolithic door slab, fighting off mosquitoes. She found that this
defensive warfare partly distracted her from the witless, interminable
bickering within. Moreover, the striated effluvia of whisky, talcum
powder, and perspiration had made her head feel a little queer. By
comparison, the fetid breath from the exposed mud banks of the salt
marsh was almost refreshing.

Possibly it was because her head did feel a little queer that Susan
began presently to wonder about things. Between her days at the
neighboring public school and her voluntary rounds of housework, Susan
had not of lat