fact of
motherhood had six times descended upon her and she was doing her
gentle, well-bred, conscientious best in six lively directions, but
under it all she was forever Helen, forever the best beloved. She was
getting rather beyond her depth but she was not giving up. Stephen, in
discussion, had an elusive way of soaring into hazy generalities. She
brought him down.

"I can't see why it should make her any less unselfish to attend the
best girls' school than to--to run with the boys." She brought out the
little vulgarism with a faint curl of her lovely lip.

"'Run with the boys!' That has a positively Salem flavor, hasn't it?
Almost as deadly, that 'with,' as 'after,'" He loved words, Stephen
Lorimer; he played with them and juggled them. "Yet isn't that exactly
what the girls of to-day must and should do? Isn't it what the girls of
to-morrow--naturally, unrebuked--will do? Not running after them, slyly
or brazenly; not sitting at home, crimped and primped and curled,
waiting to be run after. No," he said hotly, getting up and beginning to
swallow up the room from wall to wall with his long strides, "_no_! With
them. Running with them, chin in, chest out, sound, conditioned,
unashamed!" He believed that he meant to write a tremendous book, one
day, Honor's stepfather. He often reeled off whole chapters in his mind,
warm and glowing. It was only when he got it down on paper that it
cooled and congealed. "Running with them in the race--for the race----"
his hurtling promenade took him to the window and he paused for an
instant. "Come here, Mildred. Look at her!"

Mildred Lorimer came to join him. On the shabby, rusty lawn of the King
place, next door, all the rustier for its nearness to their own emerald
turf, sat Honor Carmody and Jimsy King, jointly and severally lacing up
a football.

"Yes, look at her!" said her mother with feeling.

"Leave her alone, Mildred. Leave her alive!"

The two children were utterly absorbed. The boy was half a head taller
than the girl, heavier, sturdier, of a startling beauty. There was a
stubborn, much reviled wave in his bronze hair and his eyes were a dark
hazel flecked with black. His skin was bronze, too, bronzed by many
Catalina summer and winter swims at Ocean Park. It made his teeth seem
very white and flashing.

The window was open to the soft Southern California air, and the voices
came across to the watchers.

"_Hold_ it!"

"I _am_ holding it!"

A handsome man of