ot prosper his suit. She was
just looking around in the market of life. Pippa was forever passing
through her heart singing, "God's in his heaven--all's right with the
world." She did not blink at evil; she knew it, abhorred it, but
challenged it with love. She had a vague idea that evil could be
vanquished by inviting it out to dinner and having it in for tea
frequently and she believed if it still refused to transform itself into
good, that the thing to do with evil was to be a sister to it.

The closest she ever came to overcoming evil with evil was when she
spanked little Joe Calvin for persisting in tying cans to the Morton
cat's tail, whereupon Morty Sands rose and gave the girl nine rahs,
exhibiting an enthusiasm that inspired him for a year. So Laura thought
that if the spanking had not helped much the soul of little Joe, it had
put something worth while into Morty Sands. The thought cheered her. For
Morty was her problem. During the first months after her return from
boarding school, she had broken him--excepting upon minor moonlight
relapses--of trying to kiss her, and she had sufficiently discouraged
his declarations of undying devotion, so that they came only at
weddings, or after other mitigating circumstances which, after pinching
his ear, she was able to overlook.

But she could not get him to work for a living. He wouldn't even keep
office hours. Lecturing settled nothing. Lecturing a youth in a black
and gold blazer, duck trousers and a silk shirt and a red sash, with
socks and hat to match his coat, lecturing a youth who plays the
mandolin while you talk, and looks at you through hazel eyes with all
the intelligence of an affectionate pup, lecturing a youth who you know
would be kissing you at the moment if you weren't twenty pounds heavier
and twice as strong--someway doesn't arouse enthusiasm. So Morty Sands
remained a problem.

Now an affair of the heart when a man is in his twenties and a girl is
just passing out of her teens, is never static; it is dynamic and always
there is something doing.

It was after one of Morty's innumerable summer dances in the Sands Opera
House, that Fate cast her dies for the final throw. Morty had filled
Laura Nesbit's program scandalously full. Two Newports, three military
schottisches, the York, the Racket--ask grandpa and grammer about these
dances, ye who gyrate in to-day's mazes--two waltz quadrilles and a
reel. And when you have danced half the evening with a