for a week after--that thing happened." She
glanced at the space where the instrument had stood.

"You taught yourself to play?" he asked.

"I had music lessons."

"Music lessons?"

"Not here--before I left home--up the State, in a little country town,
--Madison. It seems like a long time ago, but it's only seven years in
September. Mother and father wanted all of us children to know a little
more than they did, and I guess they pinched a good deal to give us a
chance. I went a year to the high school, and then I was all for coming
to the city--I couldn't stand Madison, there wasn't anything going on.
Mother was against it,--said I was too good-looking to leave home. I
wish I never had. You wouldn't believe I was good-looking once, would
you?"

She spoke dispassionately, not seeming to expect assent, but Hodder
glanced involuntarily at her wonderful crown of hair. She had taken off
her hat. He was thinking of the typical crime of American parents,--and
suddenly it struck him that her speech had changed, that she had dropped
the suggestive slang of the surroundings in which she now lived.

"I was a fool to come, but I couldn't see it then. All I could think of
was to get away to a place where something was happening. I wanted to
get into Ferguson's--everybody in Madison knew about Ferguson's, what a
grand store it was,--but I couldn't. And after a while I got a place at
the embroidery counter at Pratt's. That's a department store, too, you
know. It looked fine, but it wasn't long before I fell wise to a few
things." (She relapsed into slang occasionally.) "Have you ever tried
to stand on your feet for nine hours, where you couldn't sit down for a
minute? Say, when Florry Kinsley and me--she was the girl I roomed with
--would get home at night, often we'd just lie down and laugh and cry, we
were so tired, and our feet hurt so. We were too used up sometimes to
get up and cook supper on the little stove we had. And sitting around a
back bedroom all evening was worse than Madison. We'd go out, tired as
we were, and walk the streets."

He nodded, impressed by the fact that she did not seem to be appealing
to his sympathy. Nor, indeed, did she appear--in thus picking up the
threads of her past--to be consciously accounting for her present.
She recognized no causation there.

"Say, did you ever get to a place where you just had to have something
happen? When you couldn't stand bein' lonely night after night, when you