September. Mother and father wanted all of us children to know a
little more than they did, and I guess they pinched a good deal to give
us a chance. I went a year to the high school, and then I was all for
coming to the city--I couldn't stand Madison, there wasn't anything
going on. Mother was against it,--said I was too good-looking to leave
home. I wish I never had. You wouldn't believe I was good-looking once,
would you?"

She spoke dispassionately, not seeming to expect assent, but Hodder
glanced involuntarily at her wonderful crown of hair. She had taken off
her hat. He was thinking of the typical crime of American parents,--and
suddenly it struck him that her speech had changed, that she had dropped
the suggestive slang of the surroundings in which she now lived.

"I was a fool to come, but I couldn't see it then. All I could think of
was to get away to a place where something was happening. I wanted to
get into Ferguson's--everybody in Madison knew about Ferguson's, what a
grand store it was,--but I couldn't. And after a while I got a place at
the embroidery counter at Pratt's. That's a department store, too, you
know. It looked fine, but it wasn't long before I fell wise to a few
things." (She relapsed into slang occasionally.) "Have you ever tried
to stand on your feet for nine hours, where you couldn't sit down for
a minute? Say, when Florry Kinsley and me--she was the girl I roomed
with--would get home at night, often we'd just lie down and laugh
and cry, we were so tired, and our feet hurt so. We were too used up
sometimes to get up and cook supper on the little stove we had. And
sitting around a back bedroom all evening was worse than Madison. We'd
go out, tired as we were, and walk the streets."

He nodded, impressed by the fact that she did not seem to be appealing
to his sympathy. Nor, indeed, did she appear--in thus picking up the
threads of her past--to be consciously accounting for her present. She
recognized no causation there.

"Say, did you ever get to a place where you just had to have something
happen? When you couldn't stand bein' lonely night after night, when you
went out on the streets and saw everybody on the way to a good time but
you? We used to look in the newspapers for notices of the big balls,
and we'd take the cars to the West End and stand outside the awnings
watching the carriages driving up and the people coming in. And the same
with the weddings. We got to know a good many of