These stories kept alive in the hearts of the women and girls who read them the fires of real romance. Their belief in the existence of chivalrous youth and beauteous maidens was nursed by these tales, and they added nothing if not a saccharine quality to life as it is lived on the Cape. But Pearl's dippings into Helmford's books began to open her mind to the appreciation of other worlds. The highest attribute of man had heretofore been in Pearl's thought his ability to make love in a gushing, moving-picture-hero way. Perhaps her belief in the existence of such lovers had helped her hold aloof Tom Petty and his maudlin attempts at love making. In Helmford's books she found the clash of real life--in itself a more enthralling romance than any Pearl had ever before dreamed. The heroines were, too, of a different character from the girls she had actually known. Why, sometimes they were more heroic than the men themselves! She quickly awoke to the fact that romance was not something of which she could only dream. As she had told Cap'n Jonah, she thought of marriage, even if she might never reach that much-to-be-desired state. Pearl saw that Sarah Petty, for instance, was stronger than her husband, that she took the lead. She knew she, herself, was more assertive than Tom. These new book-heroines seemed to possess all the push and determination that Pearl felt simmering in her own blood. "If it was not unwomanly for those girls in the books to assert themselves, to go out into the world and be self-supporting, and in the end to choose the man they wanted for a mate instead of sitting down to wait for the right man to look them up--if it was all right for girls in books to do this, why," Pearl asked herself, "wasn't it the correct thing for real girls to do?" Pearl determined when her "time was out" at Orrin Petty's to do just as some of these new heroines did. There was even Gusty Durgin, for a local example. Modesty or a shrinking from the unknown had not kept Gusty from setting forth with the single talent of being able to cry real tears to be a moving picture actress. The rather clumsy, overfed Gusty had never before seemed a heroine to Pearl Holden; but now she saw the ex-waitress of the Cardhaven Inn in a new light. As for Pearl's opinion of Helmford himself, she at first placed him on a pedestal so high that he was scarcely in range of her humble worship. But a girl cannot take intimate care of a man's belongings--dust and sweep for him, clean up his litter, put away his garments, wash and iron his clothes, darn his socks, and otherwise care for him and for his possessions, without gaining a familiarity which, if it does not breed the proverbial contempt, certainly does tarnish any heroic quality he may have at first assumed.