"Do you good women realize what time it is?" Miss Breckenridge

asked, by way of reply.

"Has she got it a shade too short?" speculated Rachael, thoughtful

eyes on the girl's dress.

"Well--I was wondering!" Carol said eagerly, flinging down her

wrap, to turn and twist before a door that was a solid panel of

mirror. "What do you think--we'll dance."

"Oh, not a bit," Rachael presently decided. "They're all up to the

knees this year, anyway. Car come round?"

"Long ago," said Billy, and Elinor, reaching for her own wrap,

declared herself ready. "I wish you were going, Rachael," the girl

added as she turned to follow their guest from the room.

"Come back here a moment, Bill," Mrs. Breckenridge said casually,

seating herself at the dressing-table without a glance at her

stepdaughter. For a moment Miss Breckenridge stood irresolute in

the doorway, then she reluctantly came in.

"You're just seventeen, Billy," said the older woman

indifferently. "When you're eighteen, next March, I suppose you

may do as you please. But until then--either see a little less of

Joe Pickering, or else come right out in the open about it, and

tell your father you want to see him here. This silly business of

telephoning and writing and meeting him, here, there, and

everywhere, has got to stop."

Billy stared steadily at her stepmother, her breath coming quick

and high, her cheeks red.

"Who said I met him--places?" she said, in a seventeen-year-old-

girl's idea of a tragic tone. Mrs. Breckenridge's answer to this

was a shrug, a smile, and a motherly request not to be a fool.

There was silence for a moment. Then Billy said recklessly: "I like him. And you can't make me deny it!"

"Like him if you want to," said Mrs. Breckenridge, "although what

you can see in a man twice your age--with his particular history--

However, it's your affair. But you'll have to tell your father."

Billy shut her lips mutinously, her cheeks still scarlet.

"I don't see why!" she burst forth proudly, at last.

To this Mrs. Breckenridge offered no argument. Carefully filing a

polished fingertip she said quietly: "I didn't suppose you would."

"And I think that if you tell him YOU interfere in a matter that

doesn't in the LEAST concern you," Billy pursued hotly,

uncomfortably eager to strike an answering spark, and reduce the

conversation to a state where mutual concessions might be in

order. "You have no BUSINESS to!"

Her stepmother was silent. She put on a ring, regarded it

thoughtfully on her spread fingers, and took it off again.

"In the first place," Billy said sullenly, "you'll tell him a lot

of things that aren't so!"




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