ing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to
blow my pitch pipe for a minor key.

Not that Hester's isn't one of the oldest stories in the world, too. No
matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks
younger than love--and how often the two are interchangeable!

If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or
a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two
charges.

She was neither. The most that can be said for her is that she was
honestly what she was.

"If the wages of sin is death," she said to a roadhouse party of
roysterers one dawn, "then I've quite a bit of back pay coming to me."
And joined in the shout that rose off the table.

I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed
lines of her very, very old story. Whose pasts so quickly mold and
disintegrate as those of women of Hester's stripe? Their yesterdays are
entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.

For the first seventeen years of her life she lived in what we might
call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants.
Her particular one was in Ohio. Demopolis, I think. One of those
change-engine-and-take-on-water stops with a stucco art-nouveau station,
a roof drooping all round it, as if it needed to be shaved off like
edges of a pie, and the name of the town writ in conch shells on a
green slant of terrace. You know--the kind that first establishes a
ten-o'clock curfew for its young, its dance halls and motion-picture
theaters, and then sends in a hurry call for a social-service expert
from one of the large Eastern cities to come and diagnose its malignant
vice undergrowth.

Hester Bevins, of a mother who died bearing her and one of those
disappearing fathers who can speed away after the accident without even
stopping to pick up the child or leave a license number, was reared--no,
grew up, is better--in the home of an aunt. A blond aunt with many gold
teeth and many pink and blue wrappers.

Whatever Hester knew of the kind of home that fostered her, it left
apparently no welt across her sensibilities. It was a rather poor house,
an unpainted frame in a poor street, but there was never a lack of
gayety or, for that matter, any pinching lack of funds. It was an actual
fact that, at thirteen, cotton or lisle stockings brought out a
little irritated rash on Hester's slim young legs, and she wore silk.
Abomina