t he hadn't changed a bit. Wasn't it likely that he'd turn out to
be some one she could cling to a little; confide her perplexities
to--some of them? Was there a chance that ripened, disillusioned, made
gentle and wise by the alchemy of the furnace he had come through, he
might prove to be the one person in the world to whom she could confide
everything? That would make an end to her nightmare, she felt sure.

The question whether he was or was not going to turn out like that was
one presently to be answered. Until she knew the answer she didn't want
to think at all, least of all about those things which Baldy's talk
to-night kept rousing echoes of.

"Oh, they all look good when they're far away," she said, picking that
bit of comic supplement slang deliberately to annoy him. "I don't believe
our grandfathers and grandmothers were always such models of decorum as
they tried, when they had grown old, to make us think. And the simple
primitive joys ... I believe an old-fashioned husking bee, if they had
plenty of hard cider to go with it, was just as bad as this--coarser if
not so vulgar. After all, most of these people will go virtuously home
to bed pretty soon and you'd find them back at work to-morrow morning not
any the worse, really, for this. It may be a rather poor sort of home
they go to, but how do you know that the vine-covered cottage you have
been talking about was any better?"

"Not to mention," he added, in humorous concurrence, "that there was
probably typhoid in the well the old oaken bucket hung in. It seems odd
to be convicted of sentimentality by an innocent babe like you. But if
you had been looking at the party down at the end table behind you that
I've had under my eye for ten minutes, perhaps you'd feel more as I do.
No! don't turn around; they have been looking at us."

"Moralizing over us, perhaps," she suggested. "Thinking how wicked we
probably were."

"No," he said, "I happen to know the girls. They live down in our part of
town, just over in the Village, that is. They have been here six or eight
years. One of them was quite a promising young illustrator once. And
they're both well-bred--came obviously from good homes. And they've both
gone, well--clean over the edge."

Somehow his innocent euphemism annoyed her. "You mean they are
prostitutes?" she asked.

He frowned in protest at her employment of the word but assented
unequivocally. He was used--as who is not--to hearing young women d