-then saw the careless straightforwardness of
his face, and was straightforward herself: "I guess I'd better be going
home."

"Oh, come on," he urged her.

She yielded, with a little rollicking chuckle; and as they walked toward
a part of town more suitable for such excursions, she confided to him
she was twenty, and she'd been "around" for a year.

("Twenty-five, if she's a day," he thought.)

They strolled along for several blocks before discovering, in the
purlieus of Tyler Street, a dingy "ice-cream parlor," eminently fitted
for interviews with the Lilys of the locality. At a marble-topped table,
translucent with years of ice-cream rendezvous, they waited for his
order to be filled, and she saw the amused honesty of his face and he
saw the good nature of hers; which made him think again of Eleanor's
wish to help her.

He urged some indifferent cake upon her, and joked about how many
saucers of ice cream they could consume between them; then he became
serious: Why didn't she drop Batty?

"Oh," she said, "if I only _could_ drop him! I hate him. He's the first
friend I've had."

"Was he really the--the first?" Maurice said. His question was the old
human interest of playing with fire, but he supposed that it was a
desire to raise the fallen.

"Well, except ... there was a man; I expected to marry _him_. Then
Batty, he come along."

"I see," said Maurice. "Where's the first man?"

"_I_ don't know. I was only sixteen."

"Damn him!" Maurice said, sympathetically. He was so moved that he
ordered more ice cream; then it occurred to him that he ought to let her
know that he was entirely a philanthropist. "My wife and I'll help you,"
he said.

"Oh ... you're _married_? You're real young!" she commented.

"I'm no chicken. My wife and I think exactly alike about these things.
Of course she's not a prude. She understands life, just as I do. And
she'd love to be a real friend to you. She'll put you on your feet, and
think none the worse of you. Tell me about yourself," he urged,
intimately; he felt some deep satisfaction stir within him, which he
supposed was his recognition of a moral purpose. But she drew back into
her own reserves.

"They always ask that," she thought; and the momentary reality she had
shown hardened into the easy lying of her business: she told this or
that--the cruel father of fiction, who tried to drive her into marriage
with the rich old man; the wicked lover who destroyed trusting
inno