red her rather fly.
Terry's hair was very black, and she had a fondness for those little,
close-fitting scarlet velvet turbans. A scarlet velvet turban would have
made Martha Washington look fly. Terry's mother had died when the girl
was eight, and Terry's father had been what is known as easy-going. A
good-natured, lovable, shiftless chap in the contracting business. He
drove around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made any
money because he did honest work and charged as little for it as men who
did not. His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not crumble, and his
lumber did not crack. Riches are not acquired in the contracting
business in that way. Ed Sheehan and his daughter were great friends.
When he died (she was nineteen) they say she screamed once, like a
banshee, and dropped to the floor.

After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's
gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to
practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and
into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication
which comes from daily contact with the artificial world of the
footlights. It is the look of those who must make believe as a business,
and are a-weary. You see it developed into its highest degree in the
face of a veteran comedian. It is the thing that gives the look of utter
pathos and tragedy to the relaxed expression of a circus clown.

There are, in a small, Mid-West town like Wetona, just two kinds of
girls. Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don't.
Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou, would have
come in the first group. She craved excitement. There was little chance
to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but she managed to find certain
means. The travelling men from the Burke House just across the street
used to drop in at the Bijou for an evening's entertainment. They
usually sat well toward the front, and Terry's expert playing, and the
gloss of her black hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimes looked
up toward the stage for a signal from one of the performers, caught
their fancy, and held it.

Terry did not accept their attentions promiscuously. She was too decent
a girl for that. But she found herself, at the end of a year or two,
with a rather large acquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen. You
occasionally saw one of them strolling home with her. Sometimes she went
drivin