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these presumptuous resolves, she promised herself that if, in the future, her soul should come starving and crying for bread it should eat the stone she might have to offer without complaint or remorse. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best.
III
    “She’s the wildest one of the Beggs, but she’s a thoroughbred,” people said.
    Alabama knew everything they said about her—there were so many boys who wanted to “protect” her that she couldn’t escape knowing. She leaned back in the swing visualizing herself in her present position.
    “Thoroughbred!” she thought, “meaning that I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.”
    “He’s just like a very majestic dog,” she thought of the tall officer beside her, “a hound, a noble hound! I wonder if his ears would meet over his nose.” The man vanished in metaphor.
    His face was long, culminating in a point of lugubrious sentimentality at the self-conscious end of his nose. He pulled himself intermittently to pieces, showered himself in fragments above her head. He was obviously at an emotional tension.
    “Little lady, do you think you could live on five thousand a year?” he asked benevolently. “To start with,” he added, on second thought.
    “I could, but I don’t want to.”
    “Then why did you kiss me?”
    “I had never kissed a man with a mustache before.”
    “That’s hardly a reason——”
    “No. But it’s as good a reason as many people have to offer for going into convents.”
    “There’s no use in my staying any longer, then,” he said sadly.
    “I s’pose not. It’s half past eleven.”
    “Alabama, you’re positively indecent. You know what an awful reputation you’ve got and I offer to marry you anyway and——”
    “And you’re angry because I won’t make you an honest man.”
    The man hid dubiously beneath the impersonality of his uniform.
    “You’ll be sorry,” he said unpleasantly.
    “I hope so,” Alabama answered. “I like paying for things I do—it makes me feel square with the world.”
    “You’re a wild Comanche. Why do you try to pretend you’re so bad and hard?”
    “Maybe so—anyway, the day that I’m sorry I’ll write it in the corner of the wedding invitations.”
    “I’ll send you a picture, so you won’t forget me.”
    “All right—if you want to.”
    Alabama slipped on the night latch and turned off the light. She waited in the absolute darkness until her eyes could distinguish the mass of the staircase. “Maybe I ought to have married him, I’ll soon be eighteen,” she tabulated, “and he could have taken good care of me. You’ve got to have some sort of background.” She reached the head of the stairs.
    “Alabama,” her mother’s voice called softly, almost indistinguishable from the currents of the darkness, “your father wants to see you in the morning. You’ll have to get up to breakfast.”
    Judge Austin Beggs sat over the silver things about the table, finely controlled, coordinated, poised in his cerebral life like a wonderful athlete in the motionless moments between the launchings of his resources.
    Addressing Alabama, he overpowered his child.
    “I tell you that I will not have my daughter’s name bandied about the street corners.”
    “Austin! She’s hardly out of school,” Millie protested.
    “All the more reason. What do you know of these officers?”
    “P—l—e—a—s—e——”
    “Joe Ingham told me his daughter was brought home scandalously intoxicated and she admitted that you had given her the liquor.”
    “She didn’t have to drink it—it was a freshman leadout and I filled my nursing bottle with gin.”
    “And you forced it on the Ingham girl?”
    “I did not! When she saw people laughing, she tried to edge in onthe joke, having none of her own to amuse them with,” Alabama retorted