commented Billy.

"And I'd be a soap-boxer if I didn't have the spending of my father's
ill-gotten gains. It's none of my affair. Islet them rot. They'd be just
as bad if they were on top. It's all a mess--blind bats, hungry swine,
and filthy buzzards--"

Here Mrs. Hall interferred.

"Now, Mark, you stop that, or you'll be getting the blues."

He tossed his mop of hair and laughed with an effort.

"No I won't," he denied. "I'm going to get ten cents from Billy at a
game of Pedro. He won't have a look in."

Saxon and Billy flourished in the genial human atmosphere of Carmel.
They appreciated in their own estimation. Saxon felt that she was
something more than a laundry girl and the wife of a union teamster.
She was no longer pent in the narrow working class environment of a
Pine street neighborhood. Life had grown opulent. They fared better
physically, materially, and spiritually; and all this was reflected
in their features, in the carriage of their bodies. She knew Billy had
never been handsomer nor in more splendid bodily condition. He swore he
had a harem, and that she was his second wife--twice as beautiful as the
first one he had married. And she demurely confessed to him that Mrs.
Hall and several others of the matrons had enthusiastically admired her
form one day when in for a cold dip in Carmel river. They had got around
her, and called her Venus, and made her crouch and assume different
poses.

Billy understood the Venus reference; for a marble one, with broken
arms, stood in Hall's living room, and the poet had told him the world
worshiped it as the perfection of female form.

"I always said you had Annette Kellerman beat a mile," Billy said; and
so proud was his air of possession that Saxon blushed and trembled, and
hid her hot face against his breast.

The men in the crowd were open in their admiration of Saxon, in an
above-board manner. But she made no mistake. She did not lose her head.
There was no chance of that, for her love for Billy beat more strongly
than ever. Nor was she guilty of over-appraisal. She knew him for what
he was, and loved him with open eyes. He had no book learning, no art,
like the other men. His grammar was bad; she knew that, just as she knew
that he would never mend it. Yet she would not have exchanged him for
any of the others, not even for Mark Hall with the princely heart whom
she loved much in the same way that she loved his wife.

For that matter, she found in Bi