"Pleased to meet you. Lilly certainly has talked of her English teacher a lot." "She is a very interesting little student, Mrs. Becker. Quite a quality to her work." "Well, I am certainly pleased to hear that. She's our only one, you know." "Lilly has a tendency to let her imagination run away with her. A good fault if she controls it." "That's what her father and I always tell her. The child has too many talents to settle down to any one. She gets her music from my side of the house, but she quits practicing to write and she quits writing to practice. It's not that we want our little girl ever to make her own living, but her father and I believe in a girl being prepared, even if she never has to use it. That's why we are having her take the commercial course. We don't pretend to be swells, but at least we plan to do as well for our child as the next." "Exactly." LILLY (in her agony): "Come, mamma." "I wish you could read the poem she wrote last night, Mr. Lindsley. Not that I give a row of pins for poetry, as a rule, but I told her she ought to take this one to school." "Please, mamma, please!" "If I do say it myself, it was grand. Mr. Hazzard, quite an educated gentleman who boards where we do, thought so, too. Lilly, why don't you show Mr. Lindsley that poem? He's authority." "Mamma, if only you won't talk about it." "You must bring it to class, Miss Becker." "No, no! I've--I've torn it up." "I don't remember all of it, but everybody considered it a grand thought for such a young girl; it goes--" "Mamma! Mamma--not here--now!" "I would not have the restless soul That sees not beauty everywhere. I see it glint on ocean waves, Dance through a youth's or maiden's hair." "Mamma, they're pushing so! Good night, Mr. Lindsley. Mamma, come!" Outside in the wet dusk they boarded an electric car, Lilly and her mother crammed on a rear platform of the wet overcoats, leaking umbrellas, and wet-smelling mackintoshes of dinner-bound St. Louis. "He's a right nice young man, intelligent--but if ever a person looked like a horse! You see, he agrees with your papa and me. You don't apply yourself to any one thing." Lilly turned her inflamed, quivering face upon her mother, trying to speak through a violent aching of tonsils. "Oh," she cried, "how could you? I'll never look him in the face again! Oh--oh--how could you?" "Are you crazy? How could I what?" "The poem. The--the glint in--his hair. He'll think it was his hair I meant. Oh! Oh!" The ready ire which could flame up in Mrs. Becker leaped out then. "If you are ashamed of your mother, maybe you had better not be seen out with her again. All I am good for is to stint and manage to get you pretty clothes." "No, n-no, mamma, I didn't mean that, dear." "For a horse-face like him I won't be made little." "Sh-h-h-h, dear! The whole street car doesn't need to hear." "I wouldn't give a row of pins for ten like him." "Mamma, the way you--talked."