t
have any Sunday-school bringing up and I know it. Then what you playing
with me like a cat does with a mouse for? It ain't fair, Pearl, it ain't
fair."

She turned and faced him now with an impatient gesture of the hands.
Some expression on her face, the set of her mouth, the horse-shoe frown
on her forehead gave her a fleeting resemblance to her father, a
resemblance that momentarily chilled his blood.

"For goodness' sake keep quiet a minute," she cried irritably. "You gave
me a jolt a while ago, telling me you couldn't get free, and I want a
minute or two to take it in."

"But you don't think hard of me for that," he implored. "Oh, Pearl--"
but she had again turned to her contemplation of the desert, and
realizing that further speech might bring her swift anger upon him he
walked hastily away.

Several yards from her he paused and again wiped his brow. "Oh, God!" he
muttered, lifting his face to the sky, "what does a man know about
women, anyway?"

As for Pearl, she scarcely knew that he had ceased to speak to her. She
had been thinking, as she averred, thinking back over the years. She had
been dancing professionally ever since she had been a child. As a slim,
tall, young girl, still in skirts to her shoe tops, her mother had
traveled with her, and, although this evidence of chaperonage irked her,
she had with her quick intelligence early seen its value. All about her
she saw the struggling flotsam of feminine youth, living easily,
luxuriously to-day, careless of any less prosperous morrows, and, when
those swift, inevitable morrows came, she had seen the girlish, exotic
queens of an hour, haggard, stripped of their transient splendor,
uncomprehending, almost helpless.

She saw readily enough that it was not only her superior talents and
training, the hard work and hard study which she gave to her profession
which set her above the butterflies and apart from them, but her
mother's constant presence during those early years was of almost equal
value.

All this she realized at an age when strong impressions are indelibly
retained. Her value, the tremendous value of an unsmirched virtue, a
woman's greatest asset in a world of desire and barter, became to her a
possession she cherished above her jewels, above the money she could
earn and save and the greater sums she dreamed of earning or winning by
any means--all means but one.

Her observations of the women about her who gave all for so little, her
medit