end of our experiment.
In six months,--under the State law,--you can be legally free by a
technicality. So far as I'm concerned, you're free as the wind right
now. Good luck to you."

He turned away with a smile on his lips, a smile that his eyes belied,
and she watched him walk to the corner through the same sort of driving
rain that now pelted in gray lines against her window.

She shook herself impatiently out of that retrospect. It was done. Life,
as her brother had prophesied, was no kid-glove affair. The future was
her chief concern now, not the past. Yet that immediate past, bits of
it, would now and then blaze vividly before her mental vision. The only
defense against that lay in action, in something to occupy her mind and
hands. If that motive, the desire to shun mental reflexes that brought
pain, were not sufficient, there was the equally potent necessity to
earn her bread. Never again would she be any man's dependent, a pampered
doll, a parasite trading on her sex. They were hard names she called
herself.

Meantime she had not been idle; neither had she come to Seattle on a
blind impulse. She knew of a singing teacher there whose reputation was
more than local, a vocal authority whose word carried weight far beyond
Puget Sound. First she meant to see him, get an impartial estimate of
the value of her voice, of the training she would need. Through him she
hoped to get in touch with some outlet for the only talent she
possessed. And she had received more encouragement than she dared hope.
He listened to her sing, then tested the range and flexibility of her
voice.

"Amazing," he said frankly. "You have a rare natural endowment. If you
have the determination and the sense of dramatic values that musical
discipline will give you, you should go far. You should find your place
in opera."

"That's my ambition," Stella answered. "But that requires time and
training. And that means money. I have to earn it."

The upshot of that conversation was an appointment to meet the manager
of a photoplay house, who wanted a singer. Stella looked at her watch
now, and rose to go. Money, always money, if one wanted to get anywhere,
she reflected cynically. No wonder men struggled desperately for that
token of power.

She reached the Charteris Theater, and a doorman gave her access to the
dim interior. There was a light in the operator's cage high at the rear,
another shaded glow at the piano, where a young man with hair b