quite took away the sense of hunger.
But when the food came she discovered that she was, on the
contrary, ravenous--and she ate with rising spirits, with a
feeling of content and hope. He had urged her to drink wine or
beer, but she refused to take anything but a glass of milk; and
he ended by taking milk himself. He was looking more and more
boldly and ardently into her eyes, and she received his glances
smilingly. She felt thoroughly at ease and at home, as if she
were back once more among her own sort of people--with some
element of disagreeable constraint left out.

Since she was an outcast, she need not bother about the small
restraints the girls felt compelled to put upon themselves in
the company of boys. Nobody respected a "bastard," as they
called her when they spoke frankly. So with nothing to lose she
could at least get what pleasure there was in freedom. She liked
it, having this handsome, well-dressed young man making love to
her in this grand restaurant where things were so good to eat
and so excitingly expensive. He would not regard her as fit to
associate with his respectable mother and sisters. In the casts
of respectability, her place was with Jeb Ferguson! She was
better off, clear of the whole unjust and horrible business of
respectable life, clear of it and free, frankly in the outcast
class. She had not realized--and she did not realize--that
association with the players of the show boat had made any
especial change in her; in fact, it had loosened to the
sloughing point the whole skin of her conventional
training--that surface skin which seems part of the very essence
of our being until something happens to force us to shed it.
Crises, catastrophes, may scratch that skin, or cut clear
through it; but only the gentle, steady, everywhere-acting
prying-loose of day and night association can change it from a
skin to a loose envelope ready to be shed at any moment.

"What are you going to do?" asked the young man, when the
acquaintance had become a friendship--which was before the
peaches and ice cream were served.

"I don't know," said the girl, with the secretive instinct of
self-reliance hiding the unhappiness his abrupt question set to
throbbing again.

"Honestly, I've never met anyone that was so congenial. But
maybe you don't feel that way?"

"Then again maybe I do," rejoined she, forcing a merry smile.

His face flushed with embarrassment, but his eyes grew more
ardent as h