experience as a teacher. What do you do yourself when a girl begins to
cry?"

"If she's quite a child, I try to comfort her. If it's one of the older
girls, I tell her that I dislike hysteria, and that she had better go
away until she has recovered. But it rarely happens with the older
girls. What made Dora Stenson cry?"

"All my own fault--the whole thing. You know the beauties I had to
teach. Dora was the only one that had any gift. As for the rest, you
might as well have tried to teach blind pigs to draw. What was the
consequence? I gave Dora most of the teaching, and I was harder on her
than I was on the others. I judged her by a different standard, and I
drove her as hard as I could. Well, one day, at the end of the hour, she
brought me up some bad work. She'd taken no trouble. It was rotten. All
the same, if any of the others had shown me anything nearly as good, I
should have been more than satisfied. As it was Dora, I lost my wool and
told her what I thought. Classes were dismissed. You went out. I was
left alone in the room. Back came Dora to pick up some truck she'd left
behind, and she was crying--crying like anything. Well, I couldn't stand
it. I'd never meant to be a brute, and there was that girl--very pretty
she is, too--crying like anything. I began to talk to her, and, before I
knew where I was, I had kissed her. I'm making a clean breast of the
whole thing--I kissed her two or three times."

Miss Myra Larose, who had not wanted to hear about it, had listened with
breathless interest, and now put in a shrewd question.

"And did Dora kiss you?"

"As I was saying, where I was wrong was in--"

"All right, I know. If she had not kissed you, you would have said so.
But, seeing that she did kiss you, why on earth did she complain to Mrs
Dewlop?"

"She never did. She wrote a letter to a girl friend of hers, and left it
lying about. Mrs Dewlop read it. Now, what do you think?"

Myra considered a moment. "I think," she said deliberately, "that Dora
was a braggart, and that Mrs Dewlop was a sneak, and--er--not very wise,
and that you----"

"Do you also think me a satyr?"

"Of course not. You were all wrong, but you were just a baby."

He gave a sigh of relief.

"It makes me angry," said Myra impulsively. "What right had that woman
to ruin you, and turn you into a cab-driver?"

"I must explain further. It is true that she refused me any kind of a
character, and that my teaching career was closed.