olid,
straight, healthy waist, while her mother flutters about and pretends to
believe that she is curved like a houri, like Helen of Troy, like Isolde
at eighteen.

Una was touched by her mother's sincere eagerness in trying to make her
pretty. Poor little mother. It had been hard on her to sit alone all day
in a city flat, with no Panama neighbors to drop in on her, no meeting
of the Panama Study Club, and with Una bringing home her books to work
aloof all evening.

The day before the dance, J. J. Todd dourly asked her if he might call
for her and take her home. Una accepted hesitatingly. As she did so, she
unconsciously glanced at the decorative Sam Weintraub, who was rocking
on his toes and flirting with Miss Moore, the kittenish belle of the
school.

She must have worried for fifteen minutes over the question of whether
she was going to wear a hat or a scarf, trying to remember the best
social precedents of Panama as laid down by Mrs. Dr. Smith, trying to
recall New York women as she had once or twice seen them in the evening
on Broadway. Finally, she jerked a pale-blue chiffon scarf over her
mildly pretty hair, pulled on her new long, white kid gloves, noted
miserably that the gloves did not quite cover her pebbly elbows, and
snapped at her fussing mother: "Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm a perfect
sight, anyway, so what's the use of worrying!"

Her mother looked so hurt and bewildered that Una pulled her down into a
chair, and, kneeling on the floor with her arms about her, crooned, "Oh,
I'm just nervous, mumsie dear; working so hard and all. I'll have the
best time, now you've made me so pretty for the dance." Clasped thus, an
intense brooding affection holding them and seeming to fill the shabby
sitting-room, they waited for the coming of her Tristan, her chevalier,
the flat-footed J. J. Todd.

They heard Todd shamble along the hall. They wriggled with concealed
laughter and held each other tighter when he stopped at the door of the
flat and blew his nervous nose in a tremendous blast.... More vulgar
possibly than the trumpetry which heralded the arrival of Lancelot at a
chateau, but on the whole quite as effective.

She set out with him, observing his pitiful, home-cleaned, black
sack-suit, and home-shined, expansive, black boots and ready-made tie,
while he talked easily, and was merely rude about dances and clothes and
the weather.

In the study-hall, which had been cleared of all seats except for a
fri