s
gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to
practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou,
and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of
sophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial world
of the footlights.

There are, in a small Midwest town like Wetona, just two kinds of
girls. Those who go downtown Saturday nights, and those who don't.
Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou, would have
come in the first group. She craved excitement. There was little
chance to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but she managed to find
certain means. The traveling men from the Burke House just across the
street used to drop in at the Bijou for an evening's entertainment.
They usually sat well toward the front, and Terry's expert playing, and
the gloss of her black hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimes
looked up toward the stage for a signal from one of the performers
caught their fancy, and held it.

She found herself, at the end of a year or two, with a rather large
acquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen. You occasionally saw
one of them strolling home with her. Sometimes she went driving with
one of them of a Sunday afternoon. And she rather enjoyed taking
Sunday dinner at the Burke Hotel with a favored friend. She thought
those small-town hotel Sunday dinners the last word in elegance. The
roast course was always accompanied by an aqueous, semifrozen
concoction which the bill of fare revealed as Roman Punch. It added a
royal touch to the repast, even when served with roast pork.

Terry was twenty-two when Orville Platt, making his initial Wisconsin
trip for the wholesale grocery house he represented, first beheld her
piquant Irish profile, and heard her deft manipulation of the keys.
Orville had the fat man's sense of rhythm and love of music. He had a
buttery tenor voice, too, of which he was rather proud.

He spent three days in Wetona that first trip, and every evening saw
him at the Bijou, first row, center. He stayed through two shows each
time, and before he had been there fifteen minutes Terry was conscious
of him through the back of her head. Orville Platt paid no more heed
to the stage, and what was occurring thereon, than if it had not been.
He sat looking at Terry, and waggling his head in time to the music.
Not that Terry was a beauty. But she was one of those immaculately
clean types.