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power of evasion. The hand that had struck out had been the hand of some violated inner being. Something private and away from the self that was being lived here in the unsacred everydayness of existence, in this town on the bank of a river, had leaped up hurt and banged in the crude form of fingertips against a human cheek, leaving imprints. One felt sick, with living.
    A man named Henry Rathman, who at the time was already general shipping agent of the steamboat company that was ultimately to bear his name, had once walked her down Race Street as far as the corner of Longworth and tried to urge her into this narrow notorious lane, nodding significantly in the direction of the unlighted, heavily curtained second-story window of a narrow-shouldered house, one removed from the corner, Madame Yesska’s.
    That had seemed so horrible to her at the time (she was sixteen) that she always thereafter said of Rathman, without enlarging further, that he gave her “the shivers,” although it is again here true that she had subsequently allowed him to kiss and press her and, on one occasion of a steam-launch outing of a Turnverein Society upthe canal as far as Lockland, had permitted him to keep her head pressed against his shoulder for the homeward trip of the moonlit excursion.
    He had wanted it. To withdraw was to bring conspicuous remonstrance. He had so palpably enjoyed that pressure of her cheek against his coat, where she could feel his heart make little swelling movements of increasing celerity. How easy it was to give pleasure. Your own pleasure was the result of giving that pleasure. To say “No” hurt more than the dilemma of granting a reluctant “Yes.” That had always been Ray’s particular predicament, although almost invariably there came the time when the “No” amounted to almost the explosion of disgust that had motivated her action in striking Prothero across the cheek.
    And yet, the affair at Wielert’s had been without precedent. No one had ever before summed up for her in words of one syllable, as Prothero had, the unspoken which lay in the eyes and along the moist lips of most of the men who regarded her. Letting rest these sleeping dogs that crouched in the eyes of men, you could relax, for instance, with your head against the coat of a man like Henry Rathman, all the way from Lockland down to Plum Street, filled with the none too restful consciousness that beyond the moment probably lay a situation that would have to be handled. Subsequently, Rathman would be almost sure to press her into a position where the ultimatum would either terminate their relationship, or merely postpone an inevitable crisis.
    Apparently the fact that men were like that was part of the scheme of a universe into which she had been born, a girl.
    At least men were like this where she—Ray—was concerned.
    For the first time in her life, that night after leaving Prothero, seated, before going indoors, on the front veranda of the house on Baymiller Street, a doubt of her father crossed her mind.
    Was her stepmother right, after all? Had Adolph, during those years following her mother’s death, the formative years between seven and fifteen, let her run wild as a weed? Was she, in result, in the eyes of the miscellaneous men with whom she ran, just the potential chippie? What other so-called respectable girl in towncould conceivably have been presented with the viscid question that had come to her off of Prothero’s wetted lips? Ugh!
    It was cold sitting there in the late evening on the front porch of the house on Baymiller Street. Damp November chill whitened the breath, sank through the roomy box coat, and ran up beneath petticoats and chilled her cotton-clad legs.
    Papa, Papa! said Ray to herself, sitting down on the porch-railing and dangling one high-buttoned shoe. Oh, Papa, Papa! Her throat was hurting. She wanted to cry, but with a wilful sort of self-flagellation would not let herself, but sat there in the late chill of