e years went on she and the boy lived together in
a sort of closed corporation paradise of their own. At twenty-one Tyler,
who had gone through grammar school, high school and business college
had never kissed a girl or felt a love-pang. Stella Kamps kept her age
as a woman does whose brain and body are alert and busy. When Tyler
first went to work in the Texas State Savings Bank of Marvin the girls
would come in on various pretexts just for a glimpse of his charming
blondeur behind the little cage at the rear. It is difficult for a
small-town girl to think of reasons for going into a bank. You have to
be moneyed to do it. They say that the Davies girl saved up nickels
until she had a dollar's worth and then came into the bank and asked to
have a bill in exchange for it. They gave her one--a crisp, new, crackly
dollar bill. She reached for it, gropingly, her eyes fixed on a point at
the rear of the bank. Two days later she came in and brazenly asked to
have it changed into nickels again. She might have gone on indefinitely
thus if Tyler's country hadn't given him something more important to do
than to change dollars into nickels and back again.

On the day he left for the faraway naval training station Stella Kamps
for the second time in her life had a chance to show the stuff she was
made of, and showed it. Not a whimper. Down at the train, standing at
the car window, looking up at him and smiling, and saying futile,
foolish, final things, and seeing only his blond head among the many
thrust out of the open window.

"... and Tyler, remember what I said about your feet. You know. Dry....
And I'll send a box every week, only don't eat too many of the nut
cookies. They're so rich. Give some to the other--yes, I know you will.
I was just ... Won't it be grand to be right there on the water all the
time! My!... I'll write every night and then send it twice a week....
I don't suppose you ... Well once a week, won't you, dear?...
You're--you're moving. The train's going! Good-b--" she ran along with
it for a few feet, awkwardly, as a woman runs. Stumblingly.

And suddenly, as she ran, his head always just ahead of her, she
thought, with a great pang:

"O my God, how young he is! How young he is, and he doesn't know
anything. I should have told him.... Things.... He doesn't know anything
about ... and all those other men--"

She ran on, one arm outstretched as though to hold him a moment longer
while the train gathered sp