me, I never
would believe in any man again."

He smiled again in his frank, good way, and drew a picture from his
pocket. It was a picture of a woman bending down over a laughing, naked
child, sprawling frogwise in her lap. The woman's face was broad and
intellectual and handsome. The look of splendid maternity was in her
eyes. They both looked at the picture in silence. The girl sighed.

"I wish I was as good as that woman looks."

"You can be if you try."

"Not with a big Chicago brewer for a father, and a husband that beats
you whenever the mood takes him."

"I admit that's hard. I think the atmosphere of that Heron Lake hotel
isn't any great help to you."

"Oh, they're a gay lot there! We fight like cats and dogs." A look of
slyness and boldness came over her face. "Mrs. Shellberg hates me as
hard as I do her. She used to go around telling: 'It's very peculiar,
you know'"--she imitated her rival's voice--"'but no matter which end of
the dining-room I sit, all the men look that way!'"

The young lawyer laughed at her in spite of himself.

And she went on: "But they don't, now. That's the reason she hates me,"
she said, in conclusion. "The men don't notice her when I'm around."

To hear her fresh young lips utter those words with their vile
inflections was like taking a sudden glimpse into the underworld, where
harlots dwell and the spirits of unrestrained lusts dance in the shadowy
recesses of the human heart.

Allen, hearing this fragmentary conversation, fascinated yet uneasy,
looked at the pair with wonder. They seemed quite unconscious of their
public situation.

The young lawyer looked straight before him, while the girl, swept on by
her ignoble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had
been injected into her young life.

"I don't see what men find about her to like--unless it is her eyes.
She's got beautiful eyes. But she's vulgar--ugh! The stories she
tells--right before men, too! She'd kill any one that got ahead of her,
that woman would! And yet she'll come into my room and cry and cry, and
say: 'Don't take him away from me! Leave him to me!' Ugh! It makes me
sick." She stamped her foot, then added, irrelevantly: "She wears a wig,
too. I suppose that old fool of a judge thinks it's her own hair."

The lawyer sat in stony silence. His grave face was accusing in its set
expression, and she felt it, and was spurred on to do still deeper
injustice to herself--an insane pervers