aid she. "I _was_ not afraid. You can't
make me afraid."

"We'll see," murmured he. And his fingers began to caress her
round smooth throat.

"If you ever strike me again," she said quietly, "I'll kill you."

His eyes flinched for an instant--long enough to let her know
his innermost secret. "I want you--I want _you_--damn you," he
said, between his clinched teeth. "You're the first one I
couldn't get. There's something in you I can't get!"

"That's _me_," she replied.

"You hate me, don't you?"

"No."

"Then you love me?"

"No. I care nothing about you."

He let her drop back to the bed, went to the window, stood
looking out moodily. After a while he said without turning:

"My mother kept a book shop--on the lower East Side. She
brought me up at home. At home!" And he laughed sardonically.
"She hated me because I looked like my father."

Silence, then he spoke again:

"You've never been to my flat. I've got a swell place. I want
to cut out this part of the game. I can get along without it.
You're going to move in with me, and stop this street business.
I make good money. You can have everything you want."

"I prefer to keep on as I am."

"What's the difference? Aren't you mine whenever I want you?"

"I prefer to be free."

"_Free!_ Why, you're not free. Can't I send you to the Island
any time I feel like it--just as I can the other girls?"

"Yes--you can do that. But I'm free, all the same."

"No more than the other girls."

"Yes."

"What do you mean?"

"Unless you understand, I couldn't make you see it," she said.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up her hair,
which had partly fallen down. "I think you do understand."

"What in the hell do you want, anyhow?" he demanded.

"If I knew--do you suppose I'd be here?"

He watched her with baffled, longing eyes. "What is it," he
muttered, "that's so damn peculiar about you?"

It was the question every shrewd observant person who saw her
put to himself in one way or another; and there was excellent
reason why this should have been.

Life has a certain set of molds--lawyer, financier, gambler,
preacher, fashionable woman, prostitute, domestic woman,
laborer, clerk, and so on through a not extensive list of
familiar types with which we all soon become acquainted. And
to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we
grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is
arrested because