with a quizzical forefinger and thumb.  Then, indolently, negligently, gracefully, he had strolled out of the house, down the steps, into the hot and dusty street and so on and on and out of their lives.  Stella Kamps had never seen him again.  Her letters back home to her folks in Kansas were triumphs of bravery and bare-faced lying.  The kind of bravery, and the kind of lying that only a woman could understand.  She managed to make out, somehow, at first.  And later, very well indeed.  As the years went on she and the boy lived together in a sort of closed corporation paradise of their own.  At twenty-one Tyler, who had gone through grammar school, high school and business college had never kissed a girl or felt a love-pang.  Stella Kamps kept her age as a woman does whose brain and body are alert and busy.  When Tyler first went to work in the Texas State Savings Bank of Marvin the girls would come in on various pretexts just for a glimpse of his charming blondeur behind the little cage at the rear.  It is difficult for a small-town girl to think of reasons for going into a bank.  You have to be moneyed to do it.  They say that the Davies girl saved up nickels until she had a dollar’s worth and then came into the bank and asked to have a bill in exchange for it.  They gave her one—­a crisp, new, crackly dollar bill.  She reached for it, gropingly, her eyes fixed on a point at the rear of the bank.  Two days later she came in and brazenly asked to have it changed into nickels again.  She might have gone on indefinitely thus if Tyler’s country hadn’t given him something more important to do than to change dollars into nickels and back again.

On the day he left for the faraway naval training station Stella Kamps for the second time in her life had a chance to show the stuff she was made of, and showed it.  Not a whimper.  Down at the train, standing at the car window, looking up at him and smiling, and saying futile, foolish, final things, and seeing only his blond head among the many thrust out of the open window.

“... and Tyler, remember what I said about your feet.  You know.  Dry....  And I’ll send a box every week, only don’t eat too many of the nut cookies.  They’re so rich.  Give some to the other—­yes, I know you will.  I was just ...  Won’t it be grand to be right there on the water all the time!  My!...  I’ll write every night and then send it twice a week....  I don’t suppose you ...  Well once a week, won’t you, dear?...  You’re—­you’re moving.  The train’s going!  Good-b—­” she ran along with it for a few feet, awkwardly, as a woman runs.  Stumblingly.

And suddenly, as she ran, his head always just ahead of her, she thought, with a great pang: 

“O my God, how young he is!  How young he is, and he doesn’t know anything.  I should have told him....  Things....  He doesn’t know anything about ... and all those other men—­”

She ran on, one arm outstretched as though to hold him a moment longer while the train gathered speed.  “Tyler!” she called, through the din and shouting.  “Tyler, be good!  Be good!” He only saw her lips moving, and could not hear, so he nodded his head, and smiled, and waved, and was gone.