King would never forget how her voice had rung out in that fearless "No!
No and no and no!"

"Just a little kid of a girl." And he had looked to her for the sanity
of mature age. A mere girl, sheltered always by father and mother,
spoiled to the _n_th degree, given no opportunity to develop her own
character, to grow up to life's responsibilities. Her mother had not
even told her of her grandparents, being ashamed of them, making Gloria
ashamed. Grandparents of whom any one might be justly proud; folk of
integrity, of stamina, of fearless hardihood, men and women of that
glorious type that builds empires. And Gloria, King sensed, was like
them. Deep within her, under the layers of artificiality which her
mother had striven so indefatigably and lovingly to lay on, she was like
them. He remembered his two days with her alone in the mountains and
sought to forget the fragment of one evening in the city. "Here she was
her real self; there she had been what her mother had made her over."

* * * * *

Gloria, with lagging steps, had gone to her room. Now she lay on her
bed, her hands pressed tight upon her closed eyes, her will set against
heeding the throbbing in her temples as she strove to think clearly.
Gratton's words rang in her ears. They plunged her into panic. For
scores of "friends" and hundreds of acquaintances she would furnish a
topic of talk. Girls who were jealous of her would get into a warm
flurry of excitement; Gloria could picture a dozen of them sitting at
their telephones, calling up this, that, and the other Mabel and
Ernestine, saying: "Oh, did you hear about Gloria Gaynor? Isn't it
_terrible_! What _could_ she have been thinking of? I knew she was----"
and so forth and so on, "ringing interminable changes." Youth, though
declared by the thoughtless to be a period of heedlessness, takes to
heart far more seriously than does Age all happenings which touch its
own interests. Pure tragedy is Youth's own realm. It feels acutely, its
imaginings are fearful, it magnifies and distorts beyond all reason. Had
Gloria been above thirty instead of under twenty this moment would have
been far, far less deeply immersed in the gloom of despair. She suffered
dry-eyed.

But Youth, condition of wedded extremes, while it holds tragedy to its
bleeding heart, cannot entirely fail in time to listen to the voice of
hope. Gloria clung passionately to the one straw offered her: Mark King
had co