nest with Martin,
all along. Why, the night before they had started on the street of
adventure, she had told him her creed, in that dark, quiet room with
the moonlight on the floor in a little pool, and had frankly cried out,
"Who cares?" for the first time. And later, upstairs in her room, in
his house, she had asked him to leave her; and he had gone, because he
understood that she wanted to remain irresponsible for a time and must
not be taken by the shoulders and shaken into caring until she had had
her fling. He understood everything--especially as to what she meant by
saying that she would go joy-riding, that she would make life spin
whichever way she wanted it to go. It was the right of youth, and what
was she but just a kid? He had never stood over her and demanded
payment, and yet he had given her everything. He understood that she
was new to the careless and carefree, and had never flung the word
honest at her head, because, being so young, she considered that she
could be let off from making payments for a time.

She wanted Martin. She wanted the comforting sight of his clean eyes
and deep chest and square shoulders. She wanted to sit down knee to
knee with him as they had done so often on the edge of the woods, and
talk and talk. She wanted to hear his man's voice and see the
laughter-lines come and go round his eyes. He was her pal and was as
reliable as the calendar. He would wipe out the effect of the
reproaches that she had been made to listen to by Alice and Gilbert.
They might be justified; they were justified; but they showed a lack of
understanding of her present mood that was to her inconceivable. She
was a kid. Couldn't they see that she was a kid? Why should they both
throw bricks at her as though she were a hawk and not a mere butterfly?

Where was Martin? Why hadn't she seen him for several days? Why had he
stayed away from home without saying where he was and what he was
doing? And what was all this about a girl with a white face and red
lips? Martin must have friends, of course. She had hers--Gilbert and
Hosack and the others, if they could be called friends. But why a girl
with a white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle? That
didn't sound much like Martin.

All these thoughts ran through Joan's mind as she walked about the
drawing-room with its open windows, in the first hour of the morning,
sending out an S. O. S. to Martin. She ought to be in bed and
asleep--not thinking