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the silence of Baymiller Street, swinging her high-buttoned shoe, with its dangling tassel.
    The Colerain Avenue car, dragging heavily along, threw a momentary light against the veranda; and the motorman, a new one named Fred Harley, leaned over and waved his cap. She threw him back a stiff-handed salute off her left eyebrow. Nice fellow. Didn’t realize he was fresh. Held the car for her if she was late, mornings.
    “Don’t know he’s fresh!” had been her stepmother’s snorting retort to Harley’s habit of waving as his car passed. “Don’t know he’s fresh! Huh! I’d like to see him so much as wave a finger, much less blow kisses, at Freda or any other girl on the block. A man knows quicker than a barometer knows, which way the wind blows in the matter of girls.”
    That was doubtless true. It was also true that in all probability there was not a girl on Baymiller Street who would have waved back to Fred Harley, or to whom Prothero would have dared utter that sickening question. For that matter, not a girl on Baymiller Street would have been found seated in Wielert’s after eleven, unchaperoned, with a traveling salesman generally known to be a man of family.
    No one would have been quicker than Ray, had such occasion arisen, to join in family prohibition against her stepsister Freda’s appearing in a rôle which Ray permitted herself. Prothero would not dream of asking a girl like Freda to take a ride up to Hamilton withhim and sit sipping beer and crumbling pretzels at Stengel’s, while he visited the linings-and-dress-findings department of Howell’s.
    Freda had a demanding little way with her. She believed that the more you demand of a man, the more he thinks of you. It would no more have occurred to her, for instance, to admonish a suitor to put the seventy-five cents it had cost him to come bearing a box of bonbons, toward a savings account, than it would have to sit around Wielert’s with a married traveling salesman.
    Men respected Freda. True, they respected her chiefly because her mother did not trust one of them out alone with her. There lay the secret! Ray had been mother to herself during those years when men first began to lay hands upon her. Schmidt had trusted her, going his guileless, unobserving way and leaving it to his girl to somehow go hers.
    Sitting there swinging her scalloped shoe, the thought smote Ray that, since her father’s marriage to the widow Tagenhorst had been destined to happen anyway, it might better have happened sooner. True, when Adolph, newly widowed, had rented the house on Baymiller Street to the wife of the late Otto Tagenhorst, and he and his daughter had continued to live in the old home as boarders, Ray had come under the influence of the woman who was later to become the second wife of her father. Still, it had been too late. The interval of years when the widower had been courting the widow, and Tagenhorst had conscientiously and subtly “kept out of it” by not seeing fit to express her opinions of the lax social methods of Ray, except by the contrast of her own daughter’s immaculately tidy behavior, had been the formative ones that had somehow clinched the point of view concerning the daughter of Adolph Schmidt. Ray was fly.
    Now, although three months Ray’s senior, there was something unspecked and protected about Freda’s youth—something right and normal. The boys who courted Freda were the boys who, if not in a position, were at least in the mood, for marriage. It was not inconceivable that a certain Hugo Hanck, temporarily nothing more than a gas-meter reader, but the only nephew and heir apparent ofone of the town’s outstanding brewers, would finish off his courtship of Freda with marriage.
    The fact was that, at eighteen, with the exception of Kurt Shendler, who owned a small bicycle-repair shop, and who had been at Ray to elope with him to Middletown ever since the days when she was fourteen and had ridden her bicycle into his shop for