le leap,
but he always asked the girl seated two chairs away. Elizabeth danced
much better than her mother--much better than most girls, for that
matter. But she was small, and dark, and rather shy, and wore thick
glasses that disguised the fineness of her black-lashed gray eyes. Now
and then her mother, flushed and laughing, would come up and say, "Is my
little girl having a good time?" The Welds had no money, but they
belonged to Chippewa's fashionable set. There were those who lifted
significant eyebrows at mention of the Widow Weld's name, and it was
common knowledge that no maid would stay with her for any length of time
because of the scanty provender. The widow kowtowed shamelessly to the
moneyed ones of Chippewa, flattering the women, flirting with the men.
Elizabeth had no illusions about her mother, but she was stubbornly
loyal to her. Her manner toward her kittenish parent was rather sternly
maternal. But she was the honest sort that congenitally hates sham and
pretence. She was often deliberately rude to the very people toward whom
her mother was servile. Her strange friendship with Angie Hatton, the
lovely and millioned, was the one thing in Elizabeth's life of which her
Machiavellian mother approved.

"Betty, you practically stuck out your tongue at Mr. Oakley!" This after
a dance at which Elizabeth had been paired off, as usual, with the puffy
and red-eyed old widower of that name.

"I don't care. His hands are fat and he creaks when he breathes."

"Next to Hatton, he's the richest man in Chippewa. And he likes you."

"He'd better not!" She spat it out, and the gray eyes blazed behind the
glasses. "I'd rather be plastered up against the wall all my life than
dance with him. Fat!"

"Well, my dear, you're no beauty, you know," with cruel frankness.

"I'm not much to look at," replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful
inside."

"Rot!" retorted the Widow Weld, inelegantly.

Had you lived in Chippewa all this explanation would have been
unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that
of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle.

When Chug Scaritt first met the Weld girl she was standing out in the
middle of the country road at ten-thirty P.M., her arms outstretched and
the blood running down one cheek. He had been purring along the road
toward home, drowsy and lulled by the motion and the April air. His
thoughts had been drowsy, too, and disconnected.