With this disposition to compromise the father had little difficulty in dealing, so the daily routine was continued. Allie applied herself to the cultivation of the ordinary social niceties with the same zeal that she followed her studies and her physical exercises. Fortunately these exercises afforded outlet for the impatience and the scorn that she felt for herself. Otherwise there would have been no living with her. As it was she showed herself no mercy. Daylight found her stirring, her Swedish drill she took with a vigor that fairly shook the floor, and, having finished this, she donned sweater and boots and went for a swift walk over the hills. At this hour she had the roads to herself and was glad of it, for she felt ridiculous. At breakfast, although she had a ravenous appetite, she ate sparingly. The day was spent in reading aloud, in lessons in deportment, voice modulation, conversation, and the like; in learning how to enter and how to leave a room, how to behave at a tea or a reception, how to accept and how to make an introduction, how to walk, how to sit, how to rise. Allie did sums in arithmetic, she studied grammar and geography and penmanship--in short, she took an intensified common-school course. Here was where her tutoress had trouble, for when the girl's brain became weary or confused she relieved her baffled rage in her most natural way, the while Mrs. Ring stopped her ears and moaned. It was a regimen that no ordinary woman could have endured; it would have taxed the strength of an athlete. Late in the afternoon Allie went riding, and here was one accomplishment in which she required no coaching. Frequently she vented her spite upon her horse, and more than once she brought it home with its mouth bleeding and its flanks white with lather. She rode with a magnificent recklessness that finally caused comment among the other guests. Allie was sitting alone in her room one evening, fagged out from a hard day. Some people were talking on the veranda outside her window, and she heard one say: "The girl can look really stunning." "Exactly. I don't understand where she gets her looks, for her parents are--impossible. Wouldn't you _know_ what they were?" Allie needed no clearer indication of who was under discussion. Instinctive resentment at the reference to her father and mother was followed by amazement, delight, at the compliment to herself--the first she had ever received. She leaned forward, straining to hear more. What mattered it how these contemptuous outsiders referred to her parents? They agreed that she was "stunning," which was their way of saying that she was pretty, nay, more--beautiful, perhaps. "She's a glorious rider," the first speaker was saying. "She passed me the other day, going like sin, with her face blazing and that big, lively chestnut running flat. The way she took that curve above the Devil's Slide brought my heart into my mouth."