"

"But, Rush, you've _seen_ her!"

"Only that once, at the wedding. She was made up to look young then, of
course. Painted and dyed and so on, I suppose. I felt so embarrassed and
silly over the whole thing--being just a kid--that I hardly looked at
her. And that was a long while ago."

Mary laughed at that, though she knew it would annoy him. "She never
paints nor dyes nor anything, Ruddy. She doesn't have to. She's such a
perfectly raving beauty without it. And she's more beautiful now than she
was then. She really is young, you see. Hardly enough older than we are
to matter, now that we're grown up."

She saw Rush digesting this idea of a beautiful young stepmother whom he
was to be privileged to call--straight off--by her first name, with a
certain satisfaction, so she waited--rather conscious that she was being
patient--for him to come back from the digression of his own accord.
Presently he did.

"What does she do that you don't like?"

"She does nothing that isn't perfectly nice, and good-tempered,
and--respectable," Mary assured him, and added on a warmer note, "Oh, and
she's really amiable and lovely. I was being a cat. But I am truly fond
of her--when I have her to myself. It's when she's with father ..."

She broke off there, seeing that she could not make that clear to him
(how could she since she would not state it in plain terms to herself?)
and hurried on, "It's really father whom I don't get on with, any more.
He worries about me and feels sorry for me and wants me to come home. But
I'm nothing to him when I do come--but an embarrassment.--No, it _isn't_
rot. He knows it himself and feels horrid about it and raises my
allowance when I go away, though it was foolishly big already; and then,
as soon as I'm back here he begins worrying again, and urging me to come
home. He didn't insist as long as I was doing war work, but now that
that's played out, I suppose he will.

"Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do. I ought to answer some
advertisement for a typist--I can do that, but not stenography--and take
a regular job. The sort you said you'd shoot Mr. Whitney for offering
you. And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the
cross-town twenties and live on what I earned. That's the only thing I
can see, and, Rush, I simply haven't the courage to do it. It seems as
if I couldn't do it."

His lively horror at the bare suggestion of such a thing drew her into a
half-hearted defense of t