tions, it is true, at three pair for a dollar, that sprang runs
and would not hold a darn, but, just the same, they were silk. There was
an air of easy _camaraderie_ and easy money about that house. It was
not unusual for her to come home from school at high noon and find a
front-room group of one, two, three, or four guests, almost invariably
men. Frequently these guests handed her out as much as half a dollar
for candy money, and not another child in school reckoned in more than
pennies.

Once a guest, for reasons of odd change, I suppose, handed her out
thirteen cents. Outraged, at the meanness of the sum, and with an early
and deep-dyed superstition of thirteen, she dashed the coins out of his
hand and to the four corners of the room, escaping in the guffaw of
laughter that went up.

Often her childish sleep in a small top room with slanting sides would
be broken upon by loud ribaldry that lasted into dawn, but never by
word, and certainly not by deed, was she to know from her aunt any of
its sordid significance.

Literally, Hester Bevins was left to feather her own nest. There were
no demands made upon her. Once, in the little atrocious front parlor of
horsehair and chromo, one of the guests, the town baggage-master, to
be exact, made to embrace her, receiving from the left rear a sounding
smack across cheek and ear from the aunt.

"Cut that! Hester, go out and play! Whatever she's got to learn from
life, she can't say she learned it in my house."

There were even two years of high school, and at sixteen, when she went,
at her own volition, to clerk in Finley's two-story department store on
High Street, she was still innocent, although she and Gerald Fishback
were openly sweethearts.

Gerald was a Thor. Of course, you are not to take that literally; but if
ever there was a carnification of the great god himself, then Gerald was
in his image. A wide streak of the Scandinavian ran through his make-up,
although he had been born in Middletown, and from there had come
recently to the Finley Dry Goods Company as an accountant.

He was so the viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had
carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream.
Hester was one of them.

It was at this picnic, the Finley annual, that he asked Hester, then
seventeen, to marry him. She was darkly, wildly pretty, as a rambler
rose tugging at its stem is restlessly pretty, as a pointed little
gazelle smelling up at