Rachael presently came back, with the signs of her recent emotion entirely effaced, and her wonderful skin glowing faintly from a bath.  Superbly independent of cosmetics, independent even of her mirror, she massed the thick short lengths of dark hair on the top of her head, thrust a jewelled pin through the coil, and began to hook herself into a lacy black evening gown that was loose and comfortable.  Before this was finished her stepdaughter rapped on the door, and being invited, came in with the full self-consciousness of seventeen.

“All hooked up straight?” asked Rachael.  “That gown looks rather well.”

“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!”