“I’m thinking a lot of things,” she answered, but without turning her head to look at him, “and I ain’t through yet.  Now I’ve got to studying on this matter, I’m a-going to think it out here and now.”

“But what is there to think about?” in a sort of exasperated despair.  “Oh, Pearl, how can you be so cruel!  I know you ain’t got any of the fool ideas of the dead ones I was talking about.  You couldn’t have; not with Isobel Montmorenci for a grandmother, and Queenie Madrew for a mother, and the same kind on your Pop’s side of the house.  You didn’t have any Sunday-school bringing up and I know it.  Then what you playing with me like a cat does with a mouse for?  It ain’t fair, Pearl, it ain’t fair.”

She turned and faced him now with an impatient gesture of the hands.  Some expression on her face, the set of her mouth, the horse-shoe frown on her forehead gave her a fleeting resemblance to her father, a resemblance that momentarily chilled his blood.

“For goodness’ sake keep quiet a minute,” she cried irritably.  “You gave me a jolt a while ago, telling me you couldn’t get free, and I want a minute or two to take it in.”

“But you don’t think hard of me for that,” he implored.  “Oh, Pearl—­” but she had again turned to her contemplation of the desert, and realizing that further speech might bring her swift anger upon him he walked hastily away.

Several yards from her he paused and again wiped his brow.  “Oh, God!” he muttered, lifting his face to the sky, “what does a man know about women, anyway?”

As for Pearl, she scarcely knew that he had ceased to speak to her.  She had been thinking, as she averred, thinking back over the years.  She had been dancing professionally ever since she had been a child.  As a slim, tall, young girl, still in skirts to her shoe tops, her mother had traveled with her, and, although this evidence of chaperonage irked her, she had with her quick intelligence early seen its value.  All about her she saw the struggling flotsam of feminine youth, living easily, luxuriously to-day, careless of any less prosperous morrows, and, when those swift, inevitable morrows came, she had seen the girlish, exotic queens of an hour, haggard, stripped of their transient splendor, uncomprehending, almost helpless.

She saw readily enough that it was not only her superior talents and training, the hard work and hard study which she gave to her profession which set her above the butterflies and apart from them, but her mother’s constant presence during those early years was of almost equal value.

All this she realized at an age when strong impressions are indelibly retained.  Her value, the tremendous value of an unsmirched virtue, a woman’s greatest asset in a world of desire and barter, became to her a possession she cherished above her jewels, above the money she could earn and save and the greater sums she dreamed of earning or winning by any means—­all means but one.