what's it all ABOUT?" Alice cried. "Simply because you met me
down-town with a man I never saw but once before and just barely know!
Why all this palaver?"

"'Why?'" he repeated, grinning. "Well, I've seen you start before, you
know!" He went to the door, and paused. "I got no date to-night. Take
you to the movies, you care to go."

She declined crisply. "No, thanks!"

"Come on," he said, as pleasantly as he knew how.

"Give me a chance to show you a better time than we had up at that
frozen-face joint. I'll get you some chop suey afterward."

"No, thanks!"

"All right," he responded and waved a flippant adieu. "As the barber
says, 'The better the advice, the worse it's wasted!' Good-night!"

Alice shrugged her shoulders; but a moment or two later, as the jar of
the carelessly slammed front door went through the house, she shook her
head, reconsidering. "Perhaps I ought to have gone with him. It might
have kept him away from whatever dreadful people are his friends--at
least for one night."

"Oh, I'm sure Walter's a GOOD boy," Mrs. Adams said, soothingly; and
this was what she almost always said when either her husband or Alice
expressed such misgivings. "He's odd, and he's picked up right queer
manners; but that's only because we haven't given him advantages like
the other young men. But I'm sure he's a GOOD boy."

She reverted to the subject a little later, while she washed the dishes
and Alice wiped them. "Of course Walter could take his place with the
other nice boys of the town even yet," she said. "I mean, if we could
afford to help him financially. They all belong to the country clubs and
have cars and----"

"Let's don't go into that any more, mama," the daughter begged her.
"What's the use?"

"It COULD be of use," Mrs. Adams insisted. "It could if your father----"

"But papa CAN'T."

"Yes, he can."

"But how can he? He told me a man of his age CAN'T give up a business
he's been in practically all his life, and just go groping about for
something that might never turn up at all. I think he's right about it,
too, of course!"

Mrs. Adams splashed among the plates with a new vigour heightened by an
old bitterness. "Oh, yes," she said. "He talks that way; but he knows
better."

"How could he 'know better,' mama?"

"HE knows how!"

"But what does he know?"

Mrs. Adams tossed her head. "You don't suppose I'm such a fool I'd
be urging him to give up something for nothing, do you, Alice? Do you