the title of maid, but a sterner ancestry found it expedient to be
more practical and less pretentious in its terms. On these drab
Sundays Helen Somers had passionately envied the children of foreign
breed, who seemed less hedged about by sabbatical restrictions. Not
that she wished her family to _be_ of the questionable sort that went
to El Campo or Shell Mound Park for Sunday picnics and returned in
quarrelsome state at a late hour smelling of bad whisky and worse gin.
Nor did she aspire to have sprung from the Teutonic stock that
perpetrated more respectable but equally noisy outings in the vicinity
of Woodward's Gardens. But she had a furtive and sly desire to float
oil-like upon the surface of this turbid sea, touching it at certain
points, yet scarcely mixing with it. Indeed, this inclination to taste
the core of life without committing herself the further indiscretion
of swallowing it grew to such proportions that at the age of fifteen
she almost succumbed to its allurement. Even at this late date she
could recall every detail of a seemingly casual conversation which she
had held with the stalwart butcher boy who came daily to the kitchen
door to deliver meat. The first day she merely had broached the
subject of Sunday picnics; the second she had intrigued him into
giving her one or two fleeting details; the third day she held him
captive a full ten minutes while he enlarged upon his subject. And so
on, until one morning he said, quite directly:

"Would you like to go to one?... If you do, I'll take you."

She had drawn back at first from this frontal attack, but in the end
she decided to chance the experience. She pretended to her mother that
she was going to see a girl friend who was sick. She met her crude
cavalier at the ferry. She even boarded the boat with him. At first he
had been a bit constrained and shy, but soon she felt the warm, moist
pressure of his thick-fingered hands against hers. And presently his
arm encircled her waist. With curious intuition she realized the
futility of struggling against him... She had to admit, in the end,
that she found his physical nearness pleasurable... She often had
wondered, looking back on that day, what might have happened if she
had gone through with this truant indiscretion. But halfway on the
journey her escort had deserted her momentarily to buy a cigar. Left
alone upon the upper deck of a ferryboat, crowded with a strident and
raucous company, she had felt h