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“What girl?”

“Becky.”

“Why not?”

“Well, she’s a grafter. And her husband was a poor nut.”

“I’m afraid he was,” said O-liver.

“He oughta of dragged her round by the hair of her head.”

“They don’t do it, Tommy,” O-liver was thoughtful. “After all a woman’s a woman. It’s easier to let her go.”

An astute observer might have found O-liver cynical about women. If he said nothing against them he certainly never said anything for them. And he kept strictly away from everything feminine in Tinkersfield, in spite of the fact that his good looks won him more than one glance from sparkling eyes.

“He acts afraid of skirts,” Henry had said to Tommy on one occasion.

“He?” Tommy was scornful. “He ain’t afraid of anything!”

Henry knew it. “Maybe it’s because you can’t do much with women on fifteen a week.”

“Well, I guess that’s so,” said Tommy, who made twenty and who had a hopeless passion.

His hopeless passion was Jane. Jane lived with her mother in a small rose-bowered bungalow at the edge of the town. She and her mother owned the bungalow, which was fortunate; they hadn’t a penny for rent. Jane’s father had died of a weak lung and the failure of his oil well. He had left the two women without an income. Jane’s mother was delicate and Jane couldn’t leave her to go out to work. So Jane dug in the little garden, and they lived largely on vegetables. She sewed for the neighbors, and bought medicine and now and then a bit of meat. She was young and strong and she had wonderful red hair. Tommy thought it was the most beautiful hair in the world. Jane was for him a sort of goddess woman. She was, he felt, infinitely above him. She knew a great deal that he didn’t, about books and things–like O-liver. She sewed for his mother, and that was the way he had met her. He would go over and sit on her front steps and talk. He felt that she treated him like a little dog that she wouldn’t harm, but wouldn’t miss if it went away. He told her of Vanity Fair and of how he felt about Becky.

“If she had been content to earn an honest living,” Jane stated severely, “the story would have had a different ending.”

“Well, she wanted things,” Tommy said.

“Most women do.” Jane jabbed her needle into a length of pink gingham which, when finished, would be rompers for a youngster across the street. “I do; and I intend to have them.”

“How?” asked the interested Tommy.

“Work for them.”

“O-liver says that fifteen dollars a week is enough for anybody to earn.”

Jane had heard of O-liver. Tommy sang his constant praises.

“Why fifteen?”

“After that you get soft.”

Jane laid down the length of pink gingham and looked at him. She hated to sew on pink; it clashed dreadfully with her hair.

“I should say,” she stated with scorn, “that your O-liver’s lazy.”

“No, he isn’t. He only wants enough to eat and enough to smoke and enough to read.”

“That sounds all right, but it isn’t. What’s he going to do when he’s old?”

“He ain’t ever going to grow old. He said so, and if you’d see him you’d know.”

Jane felt within her the stirring of curiosity. But she put it down sternly. She had no time for it.

“Tommy,” she said, “I’ve been thinking. I’ve got to earn more money, and I want your help.”

Tommy’s faithful eyes held a look of doglike affection.

“Oh, if I can–” he quavered.

“I’ve got to get ahead.” Jane was breathless. Her eyes shone.

“I’ve got to get ahead, Tommy. I can’t live all my life like this.” She held up the pink strip. “Even if I am a woman, there ought to be something more than making rompers for the rest of my days.”

“You might,” said the infatuated Tommy, “marry.”

“Marry? Marry whom?”

Tommy wished that he might shout “Me!” from the housetops. But he knew the futility of it.