e team reached its
shining perfection and held it to the end. It is still a name to conjure
with at the school on the hill, Jimsy King's. The old teachers remember;
the word comes down. "A regular old-time L. A. team--the fighting
spirit. Like the days of Jimsy King!"

Other teams might score on them; frequently they could not, but when
they did the rooting section was not dashed. It lifted up its multiple
voice, young, insolent, unafraid, in mocking song, and Honor Carmody,
just on the edge of the section, beside her stepfather, sang with them:

_You can't beat L. A. High!_
_You can't beat L. A. High!_
_Use your team to get up steam_
_But you can't beat L. A. High!_

It rolled out over the football field and echoed away in the soft
Southern California air. It was gay, inexorable; you _couldn't_ beat
L. A. High, field or bleachers.

Stephen Lorimer never missed a game. His wife went once and never again.

"I suppose I am too sensitive," she said, "but I can't help it. It's the
way I'm made. I simply cannot endure seeing anything so brutal. I can't
understand those young girls ... and the _mothers_!" Two of her own were
on the second team, now, but she never saw them play, and they came in
the back way, after games and practice, sneaking up to Honor's room with
their black eyes and their gory noses for her capable first aid. She
was not one, Mildred Lorimer, into whose blood something of the iron had
entered. Her boys bewildered her as they grew and toughened out of baby
fiber. She was a little unhappy about it, but she was more beautiful
than she had ever been in her life, and freer, with the last little
Lorimer shifting sturdily for himself and his father more in love with
her than ever. She had more or less resigned her active motherhood to
him. The things she might have done for Honor, the selection of her
frocks and hats, the color scheme of her room, her parties, the girl at
seventeen did efficiently for herself. Her childish squareness of face
and figure was rounding out rather splendidly and she had a sure and
dependable sense of what to wear. Her things were good in line and
color, smartly simple. She had thick braids of honey-colored hair wound
round her head; her brow was broad and calm, her gray eyes serene; she
had a fresh and hearty color. Stephen Lorimer believed that she had a
voice. She sang like one of the mocking birds in her garden, joyously,
radiantly, riotously, and her