had settled down securely in the old Carmody house on South
Figueroa Street. He was intensely proud of his paternity, personal and
vicarious, and took it not seriously but joyously. He was dramatic
critic and special writer for the leading newspaper of Los Angeles, and
theoretically he worked by night and slept by day, but as a matter of
puzzling fact he did not sleep at all, unless one counted his brief
morning naps. His eyes, in consequence, seemed never to be quite open,
but nothing, nevertheless, escaped them.

An outsider, looking in on them now, the erect, hot-cheeked, imperious
woman, a little insolent always of her beauty, and the lolling, lounging
man with the drooping lids, would have placed his odds unhesitatingly
on her winning of any point she might have in mind. Even Mildred Lorimer
herself, after four years and a half of being married to him, thought
she would win out over him this time. Honor was the only daughter she
had, the only daughter she would ever have, for she had definitely
decided, at forty-one, to cease her dealings with the long-legged bird
who had flapped six times to her roof, and it seemed intolerable to her
that--with five boys--her one girl should be so robustly ungirlish.

"Now, then, let's have it. You want Honor to go to Marlborough. As she
herself asked and I myself repeated,--why?"

"And as I answered you both," said his wife, trying hard to keep the
conversation spinning lightly in the air as he did, "it's because I want
her to be more like other girls."

"And I," said her husband, "do not." This was the place for Mildred
Lorimer to fling her own _why_ but her husband was too quick for her.
"Because she is so much finer and sounder and saner and sweeter as she
is. Mildred, I have never seen any living creature so selfless. What was
the word they coined in that play about Mars?--'_Otherdom?_' That's it,
yes; otherdom. That's Honor Carmody. She could have finished grammar
school at twelve, but Jimsy needed her help."

"That's just it! Can't you see how wrong that is?"

"No. I'm too much occupied with seeing how right it is. Good Lord, my
dear, in a world given over to the first person perpendicular, can't you
see the amazing beauty and rarity of your child's soul? Every day and
all day long she gives herself,--to you, to me, to the kiddies, to her
friends. She is the eternal mother." Mildred Lorimer was not the eternal
mother. She was not in fact a mother at all. The physical