ll you and maybe I won't," he cried, scooping up a handful
of sand and spraying her. "What'll you give me if I tell?"

"Why--nothing."

"Want to know?"

But at the narrowing something in his eyes she sidestepped him, stooping
down at the door of her bathhouse for a last scoop of sand at him.

"No," she cried, her hair blown like spray and the same breeze carrying
her laughter, guiltless of mood, out to sea.

On the way home, though, for the merest second, there recurred the
puzzling quirk in her thoughtlessness.

In the crush of the electric train, packed tightly into the heart of
the most yammering and petulant crowd in the world--home-going pleasure
seekers--a youth rose to give her his seat. A big, beach-tanned fellow
with a cowlick of hair, when he tipped her his hat, standing up off his
right brow like a little apostrophe to him, and blue eyes so very wide
apart, and so clear, that they ran back into his head like aisles with
little lakes shining at the ends of them.

"Thank you," said Marylin, the infinitesimal second while his hat and
cowlick lifted, her own gaze seeming to run down those avenues of his
eyes for a look into the pools at the back.

"That was it, too, Getaway! The thing that fellow looked--that I
couldn't say. He said it--with his eyes."

"Who?"

"That fellow who gave me this seat."

"I'll break his face if he goo-goos you," said Getaway, who by this time
had a headache and whose feet had fitted reluctantly back into patent
leather.

But inexplicably, even to herself, that night, in the shadow of the
stoop of her witch of a rooming house, she let him kiss her lips. His
first of her--her first to any man. It may have been that suddenly she
was so extremely tired--tired of the lay of the week ahead, suggested by
the smells and the noises and the consciousness of that front box pleat.

The little surrender, even though she drew back immediately, was wine to
him and as truly an intoxicant.

"Marylin," he cried, wild for her lips again, "I can't be held off much
longer. I'm straight with you, but I'm human, too."

"Don't, Getaway, not here! To-morrow--maybe."

"I'm crazy for you!"

"Go home now, Getaway."

"Yes--but just one more--"

"Promise me you'll go straight home from here--to bed."

"I promise. Marylin, one more. One little more. Your lips--"

"No, no--not now. Go--"

Suddenly, by a quirk in the dark, there was a flash of something down
Marylin's bare third finger, so