ligion. She was much about with boys, but
still merely for the life and entertainment of their company, for no
sentimental adventures. It would have been wiser to let her alone, but
nobody with whom she was brought into contact could realize the
sexlessness of the child. The truest safeguard of a girl's virtue is
familiarity with the aggregated follies of masculine adolescence.

Jenny fought her way desperately into her seventeenth year, winning
freedom in jots. She liked most of anything to go to Collin's Music-hall
with a noisy gang of attendant boys, not one of whom was as much a
separate realized entity to her as even an individual sheep is to a
shepherd. Alfie came home in the summer before her seventeenth birthday
and abetted cordially her declarations of independence. May, too, was
implicated in every plot for the subversion of parental authority.

Mrs. Raeburn worried terribly about her daughter's future. She ascribed
her hoyden behavior to the influence of the stage.

"We don't want your theatrical manners here," she would say.

"Well, who put me on the stage?" Jenny would retort.

In the Christmastide after Alfie came home Jenny went to Dublin in a
second Aldavini Quartette, and enjoyed herself more than ever. She had
now none of the desire for seclusion that marked her Glasgow period, no
contempt of man in the abstract, and was soon good friends with a
certain number of young officers whom she regarded much as she regarded
the boys of Islington.

One of them, Terence O'Meagh, of the Royal Leinster Fusiliers, made her
his own special property; he was a charming good-looking, conceited
young Irishman, as susceptible to women as most of his nation, and
endowing the practice of love with as little humor as most Celts. He
used to wait at the stage door and drive her back to her lodgings in his
own jaunting car. He used to give her small trinkets so innocently
devoid of beauty as almost to attract by their artlessness. He was a
very young officer who had borne the blushing honors of a scarlet tunic
for a very short while, so that, in addition to the Irishman's naive
assumption of universal popularity, he suffered from the sentiment that
a soldier's red coat appeals to every woman.

Jenny, with her splendid Cockney irreverence, thought little of Mr.
O'Meagh, less of his red coat, but a very great deal of the balmy
February drives past the vivid green meadows of Liffey.

"You know," Terence would say, leaning