leg over the other and to swing the pendant member with
nonchalant air, first taking a cautious survey of the neighboring back
windows to see if any one peeked. Doubtless they did, behind those
ruffled curtains, but I grew splendidly indifferent.

Even the crawling things--and there were myriads of them--added to
the enjoyment of my ease. With my ear so close to the ground the grass
seemed fairly to buzz with them. Everywhere there were crazily busy
ants, and I, patently a sluggard and therefore one of those for whom the
ancient warning was intended, considered them lazily. How they plunged
about, weaving in and out, rushing here and there, helter-skelter, like
bargain-hunting women darting wildly from counter to counter!

"O, foolish, foolish antics!" I chided them, "stop wearing yourselves
out this way. Don't you know that the game isn't worth the candle, and
that you'll give yourselves nervous jim-jams and then you'll have to go
home to be patched up? Look at me! I'm a horrible example."

But they only bustled on, heedless of my advice, and showed their
contempt by crawling over me as I lay there like a lady Gulliver.

Oh, I played what they call a heavy thinking part. It was not only the
ants that came in for lectures. I preached sternly to myself.

"Well, Dawn old girl, you've made a beautiful mess of it. A smashed-up
wreck at twenty-eight! And what have you to show for it? Nothing! You're
a useless pulp, like a lemon that has been squeezed dry. Von Gerhard was
right. There must be no more newspaper work for you, me girl. Not if you
can keep away from the fascination of it, which I don't think you can."

Then I would fall to thinking of those years of newspapering--of the
thrills of them, and the ills of them. It had been exhilarating, and
educating, but scarcely remunerative. Mother had never approved. Dad
had chuckled and said that it was a curse descended upon me from the
terrible old Kitty O'Hara, the only old maid in the history of the
O'Haras, and famed in her day for a caustic tongue and a venomed
pen. Dad and Mother--what a pair of children they had been! The very
dissimilarity of their natures had been a bond between them. Dad,
light-hearted, whimsical, care-free, improvident; Mother, gravely sweet,
anxious-browed, trying to teach economy to the handsome Irish husband
who, descendant of a long and royal line of spendthrift ancestors, would
have none of it.

It was Dad who had insisted that they name