She was not consciously selfish. If it had
been suggested to her that she was interfering with her friend's career,
she would have been shocked and grieved beyond measure. Thorpe's
devotion was a thing so complete, so perfect in its unobtrusiveness,
that it defeated its own purpose. She simply took it for granted.

He made no protest now; even smiled at her reassuringly, knowing that it
troubled her to hurt him. Only the eagerness that had for the moment
beautified his face died away, and Jacqueline, happening to glance
across at him, thought, "Poor Goddy! How old and out of it all he
looks!"

She drew him into the conversation. "I was just telling the author,
Professor Jimsy, that he inherits his patrician nose from you," she said
(somewhat to the author's embarrassment). "And he says one doesn't
inherit from uncles. That's nonsense! If property, why not noses? And
character?" she added wickedly. "Oh, I see lots of resemblances between
you!"

"Do you?" murmured the Professor, rather grimly.

"For instance, you both go in for psychology--only you don't publish
yours in large purple novels."

"I do not," said the Professor.

Channing looked at her with surprise. Was it possible that this
backwoods hoyden--Bouncing Bet of the Banister, he had named her to
himself, with a taste for alliteration--was it possible that she had
read any of his books? She was hardly more than a child. The hair hung
down her back in a thick, gleaming rope, her merry gamin's face lacked
as yet all those subtleties, those _nuances_ of expression which
fascinated him in such faces as her mother's. Channing was still young
enough to prefer the finished product. But if she read his books....

Doubtless Mrs. Kildare was not a woman to be very particular about her
young daughters' reading. The standards of a well-bred world would not
prevail in this strange household. He thought suddenly of the girl's
dangerous inheritance--the father, notorious even in a community that is
not puritanical about the morals of its men; the mother, fought over
like some hunted female of the lower creatures, yet faithful always to
the lover who had done away with the husband.... Truly, the future
career of young Jacqueline Kildare might be well worth watching. Despite
her crude youth, there was a certain warm sweetness about her which, he
noticed, drew and kept the attention of every man at the table--a
caressing voice, hands that must always touch the thing that p