ou can let
your mount out a bit over the firm, smooth road. Them that had held off
until now, on account of the gossip and leering, hurried up and got into
line with No. 9872 in the mail-order catalogue, or went to Miss
Gunslaugh, who by this time had a female wax dummy in her window in a
neat brown suit and puttees, with a coat just opening and one foot
advanced carelessly, with gauntlets and a riding crop, and a fetching
little cap over the wind-blown hair and the clear, wonderful blue eyes.
Oh, you can bet every last girl of the bunch was seeing herself send
back picture postals to her rivals telling what a royal time they was
having at Palm or Rockaway Beach or some place, and seeing the engraved
cards--'Mr. and Mrs. Burchell Daggett, at Home After the Tenth, Ophir
Avenue, Red Gap, Wash.'

"Ain't we good when you really get us, if you ever do--because some
don't. Many, indeed! I reckon there never was a woman yet outside of a
feeb' home that didn't believe she could be an A. No. 1 siren if she only
had the nerve to dress the part; never one that didn't just ache to sway
men to her lightest whim, and believe she could--not for any evil
purpose, mind you, but just to show her power. Think of the tender
hearts that must have shuddered over the damage they could and actually
might do in one of them French bathing suits like you are said to
witness in Paris and Atlantic City and other sinks of iniquity. And here
was these well-known society favourites wrought up by this legible
party, as the French say, till each one was ready to go just as far as
the Civic Purity League would let her in order to sweep him off his feet
in one mad moment. Quite right, too. It all depends on what the object
is, don't it; and wasn't theirs honourable matrimony with an
establishment and a lawn in front of it with a couple of cast-iron
moose, mebbe?

"And amid all this quaint girlish enterprise and secret infamy was the
problem of Hetty Tipton. Hetty had been a friend and a problem of mine
for seven years, or ever since she come back from normal to teach in the
third-grade grammar school; a fine, clean, honest, true-blue girl, mebbe
not as pretty you'd say at first as some others, but you like her better
after you look a few times more, and with not the slightest nonsense
about her. That last was Hetty's one curse. I ask you, what chance has a
girl got with no nonsense about her? Hetty won my sympathy right at the
start by this infirmity of