Sally had shrunk as far away from Clem Carson as the seat of the “flivver” permitted, phrases from Mrs. Stone’s embarrassed, vague, terrifying warnings boiling and churning in her mind: “Keep your body pure”—“mustn’t let men take any liberties with you”—“you’re a big girl now, things you ought to know”—“if you’re led astray, it will be due to evils in your own nature”— She suddenly loathed herself, her budding, curving young body that she had taken such innocent delight in as she bathed for her journey. She wanted to shrink and shrink and shrink, until she was a little girl again, too young to know “the facts of life,” as Mrs. Stone, blushing and embarrassed, had called the half-truths she had told Sally. She wanted to climb over the door of the car, drop into the hot dust of the road, and run like a dog-chased rabbit back into the safety of the Home. There were no men there—no queer, different male beings who would want to “take liberties”— “My land! Scared of me?” Clem Carson chuckled. “You poor little chicken! Don’t mind me, Sally. I don’t mean no harm, teasing you for a kiss. Land alive! I got a girl of my own, ain’t I? Darned proud of her, too, and I’d cut the heart outa any man that tried to take advantage of her. Ain’t got no call to be scared of me, Sally.” She smiled waveringly, shyness making her lips stiff, but she relaxed a little, though she kept as far away from the man as ever. In spite of her dread of the future and her bitter disappointment over Miss Pond’s disclosures as to her mother, she was finding the trip to the farm an adventure. In the twelve years of her life in the State Orphans’ Asylum she had never before left the orphanage unaccompanied by droves of other sheep-like, timid little girls, and unchaperoned by sharp-voiced, eagle-eyed matrons. She felt queer, detached, incomplete, like an arm or a leg dissevered from a giant body; she even had the panicky feeling that, like such a dismembered limb, she would wither and die away from that big body of which she had been a part for so long. But it was pleasant to bump swiftly along the hot, dusty white road, fringed with odorous, flowering weeds. Houses became less and less frequent; few children ran barefoot along the road, scurrying out of the path of the automobile. Occasionally a woman, with a baby sprawling on her hip, appeared in the doorway of a roadside shack and shaded her eyes with her hand as she squinted at the car.