She looked at him curiously. "That's what I like about you," she said, soberly. "You talk to me as if I had some sense--as if I were a human being. If you were to flatter me, now, and make love to me, I never would believe in any man again." He smiled again in his frank, good way, and drew a picture from his pocket. It was a picture of a woman bending down over a laughing, naked child, sprawling frogwise in her lap. The woman's face was broad and intellectual and handsome. The look of splendid maternity was in her eyes. They both looked at the picture in silence. The girl sighed. "I wish I was as good as that woman looks." "You can be if you try." "Not with a big Chicago brewer for a father, and a husband that beats you whenever the mood takes him." "I admit that's hard. I think the atmosphere of that Heron Lake hotel isn't any great help to you." "Oh, they're a gay lot there! We fight like cats and dogs." A look of slyness and boldness came over her face. "Mrs. Shellberg hates me as hard as I do her. She used to go around telling: 'It's very peculiar, you know'"--she imitated her rival's voice--"'but no matter which end of the dining-room I sit, all the men look that way!'" The young lawyer laughed at her in spite of himself. And she went on: "But they don't, now. That's the reason she hates me," she said, in conclusion. "The men don't notice her when I'm around." To hear her fresh young lips utter those words with their vile inflections was like taking a sudden glimpse into the underworld, where harlots dwell and the spirits of unrestrained lusts dance in the shadowy recesses of the human heart. Allen, hearing this fragmentary conversation, fascinated yet uneasy, looked at the pair with wonder. They seemed quite unconscious of their public situation. The young lawyer looked straight before him, while the girl, swept on by her ignoble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had been injected into her young life. "I don't see what men find about her to like--unless it is her eyes. She's got beautiful eyes. But she's vulgar--ugh! The stories she tells--right before men, too! She'd kill any one that got ahead of her, that woman would! And yet she'll come into my room and cry and cry, and say: 'Don't take him away from me! Leave him to me!' Ugh! It makes me sick." She stamped her foot, then added, irrelevantly: "She wears a wig, too. I suppose that old fool of a judge thinks it's her own hair." The lawyer sat in stony silence. His grave face was accusing in its set expression, and she felt it, and was spurred on to do still deeper injustice to herself--an insane perversity. "Not that I care a cent--I'm not jealous of her. I ain't so bad off for company as she is. She can't take anybody away from me, but she must go and break down my faith in the judge." She bit her lips to keep from crying out. She looked out of the window again, seeking control.