to me so long as she could send
out a new poster for peach marmalade. She wants to live her own life
and not be tied down to a man or a home," he groaned. "Darn these
feministic ideas, anyway! I wish I had been my own grandfather. The
girl he wanted wasn't on any old factory payroll."

He had been in love with Elizabeth Thorley ever since one night, almost
a year ago, when he had looked across a room and seen her red-brown
hair, her oval face with its uplifted pointed chin, and met her
laughing eyes. He had held her gaze for the fraction of a moment and
in that time his heart had stopped beating. When it began again the
world was a very different place to him. But, alas, it was not a
different place to her. She had suffered no magical change by the
short interchange of glances.

They had been the best of friends. They had a certain similarity of
tastes and interests, for he was an architect and she was an
advertising artist. But when he asked for more than friendship she
tilted her white chin a bit higher and told him frankly that she was
not the type of girl to want or think of marriage; that all she wished
was her work and she thanked her lucky stars every night of her life
that she had enough of it to be independent.

"Marriage to me is a many-headed dragon," she said. "It eats up a
girl's individuality, her ambitions, her talents. Oh, yes, it does!
I've seen it too many times not to know, and I want to keep Elizabeth
Thorley's personality for her as long as she lives. I shan't merge it
in that of any man."

She valued his friendship; she would like to keep it always, she added,
but she did not want his love. She did not want any man's love. That
was why Mr. Jerry shook his fist at the white face of the Washington
and swore that he loathed the idea of feminine independence, loathed it
from the very bottom of his heart.

"Why, Mary Rose, wherever have you been?" demanded startled Mrs.
Donovan, when Mary Rose, a trifle breathless and minus George
Washington, slipped into the basement flat. "I've been lookin'
everywhere for you."

"I'm sorry but I just had to find a boarding place for George
Washington. Oh, Aunt Kate, do you suppose there's any way a girl like
me can earn fifty cents every week?"

CHAPTER IV

When Larry Donovan saw his niece she had changed her shabby boy's suit
of blue serge for the clothes that Ella Murphy had outgrown. Ella had
astonished and disgusted her mother b