strong white teeth. Why
shouldn't Billy like that face? was her unvoiced query. Other men had
liked it. Other men did like it. Even the other girls admitted she was
a good-looker. Charley Long certainly liked it from the way he made life
miserable for her.

She glanced aside to the rim of the looking-glass where his photograph
was wedged, shuddered, and made a moue of distaste. There was cruelty
in those eyes, and brutishness. He was a brute. For a year, now, he had
bullied her. Other fellows were afraid to go with her. He warned them
off. She had been forced into almost slavery to his attentions. She
remembered the young bookkeeper at the laundry--not a workingman, but
a soft-handed, soft-voiced gentleman--whom Charley had beaten up at
the corner because he had been bold enough to come to take her to the
theater. And she had been helpless. For his own sake she had never dared
accept another invitation to go out with him.

And now, Wednesday night, she was going with Billy. Billy! Her heart
leaped. There would be trouble, but Billy would save her from him. She'd
like to see him try and beat Billy up.

With a quick movement, she jerked the photograph from its niche and
threw it face down upon the chest of drawers. It fell beside a small
square case of dark and tarnished leather. With a feeling as of
profanation she again seized the offending photograph and flung it
across the room into a corner. At the same time she picked up the
leather case. Springing it open, she gazed at the daguerreotype of a
worn little woman with steady gray eyes and a hopeful, pathetic mouth.
Opposite, on the velvet lining, done in gold lettering, was, CARLTON
FROM DAISY. She read it reverently, for it represented the father she
had never known, and the mother she had so little known, though she
could never forget that those wise sad eyes were gray.

Despite lack of conventional religion, Saxon's nature was deeply
religious. Her thoughts of God were vague and nebulous, and there
she was frankly puzzled. She could not vision God. Here, in the
daguerreotype, was the concrete; much she had grasped from it, and
always there seemed an infinite more to grasp. She did not go to church.
This was her high altar and holy of holies. She came to it in trouble,
in loneliness, for counsel, divination, end comfort. In so far as she
found herself different from the girls of her acquaintance, she quested
here to try to identify her characteristics in the pic