After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan’s gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to practical account.  At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial world of the footlights.  It is the look of those who must make believe as a business, and are a-weary.  You see it developed into its highest degree in the face of a veteran comedian.  It is the thing that gives the look of utter pathos and tragedy to the relaxed expression of a circus clown.

There are, in a small, Mid-West town like Wetona, just two kinds of girls.  Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don’t.  Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou, would have come in the first group.  She craved excitement.  There was little chance to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but she managed to find certain means.  The travelling men from the Burke House just across the street used to drop in at the Bijou for an evening’s entertainment.  They usually sat well toward the front, and Terry’s expert playing, and the gloss of her black hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimes looked up toward the stage for a signal from one of the performers, caught their fancy, and held it.

Terry did not accept their attentions promiscuously.  She was too decent a girl for that.  But she found herself, at the end of a year or two, with a rather large acquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen.  You occasionally saw one of them strolling home with her.  Sometimes she went driving with one of them of a Sunday afternoon.  And she rather enjoyed taking Sunday dinner at the Burke Hotel with a favoured friend.  She thought those small-town hotel Sunday dinners the last word in elegance.  The roast course was always accompanied by an aqueous, semi-frozen concoction which the bill of fare revealed as Roman punch.  It added a royal touch to the repast, even when served with roast pork.  I don’t say that any of these Lotharios snatched a kiss during a Sunday afternoon drive.  Or that Terry slapped him promptly.  But either seems extremely likely.

Terry was twenty-two when Orville Platt, making his initial Wisconsin trip for the wholesale grocery house he represented, first beheld Terry’s piquant Irish profile, and heard her deft manipulation of the keys.  Orville had the fat man’s sense of rhythm and love of music.  He had a buttery tenor voice, too, of which he was rather proud.

He spent three days in Wetona that first trip, and every evening saw him at the Bijou, first row, centre.  He stayed through two shows each time, and before he had been there fifteen minutes Terry was conscious of him through the back of her head.  In fact I think that, in all innocence, she rather played up to him.  Orville Platt paid no more heed to the stage, and what was occurring thereon, than if