s own mind: of beauty rising from the
gutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign above
it; also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the upper
stratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or conquering it.
Leading families replaced by other families, classes replaced by other
classes, nations replaced by other nations--such was the inevitable
social process--so read the records of the fifty or sixty centuries
since history began to be written. Oh, he was trying to say a lot in
this portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less than ordinary--in
her cheap shirt-waist and skirt!

And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this
Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be a
petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence. She
had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful. Her
possessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered at,
with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a landlady,
and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney Palmer and this
returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.

But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if she
developed her possibilities. With her looks, her boldness, her
cleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress. As he
painted, he wondered what she was going to do, and become; and he
watched her not only with a painter's eye intent upon the present, but
with keen speculation upon the future.

CHAPTER III

Presently Hunt's mind shifted to Larry Brainard, whom Barney Palmer and
Old Jimmie Carlisle had come here to see. Hunt had a mind curious about
every thing and every one; and blustering, bullying creature though he
was, he had the gift, possessed by but few, of audaciously thrusting
himself into other people's affairs without arousing their resentment.
He was keen to learn Maggie's attitude toward Larry; and he spoke not so
much to gain knowledge of Larry as to draw her out.

"This Larry--what sort of chap is he, Maggie?" As with most artists,
talking did not interfere with Hunt's painting.

Warm color slowly tinted Maggie's cheeks. "He's clever," she said
positively. "You already know that. But I was only a girl when he was
sent away."

Hunt smiled at her idea of her present maturity, implied by her last
sentence. "But you lived with the Duchess for a year before he was sent
awa