"Yes, of course. I suppose now you were talking about me when you----" Rosie pursed her lips and Janet, understanding her meaning, blushed guiltily. "Aw, now, Rosie, listen: all I wanted was to have Tom Sullivan see." "Well, he saw all right. So did I. So did everybody. And it was disgraceful, too!" Janet groped helplessly about for words. "I don't exactly mean on account of Tom himself." "Oh!" "Please, Rosie," Janet begged; "don't talk to me that way.... You know Tom's mother, my Aunt Kitty. You know the way she makes fun of me because I'm ugly and lanky. She's always saying that I'm an old maid already and that I'll never get a boy to look at me. So I just wanted her to hear about a nice fella like Jarge Riley hugging me and kissing me." Rosie looked at Janet in astonishment. She had certainly expected Janet to make up a better story than that. "Well, I must say, Janet McFadden, this is news to me! Since when have you got so particular about what your Aunt Kitty thinks or doesn't think? I always supposed she was beneath your contemp'." "No, no, Rosie, it isn't that! I don't care what she thinks or what she says either, if only she wouldn't go blabbing it around everywhere!" With a sudden gust of passion, Janet clenched her hands and breathed hard. "Oh, how I hate her!" Rosie had nothing to say and, after a pause, Janet continued more quietly: "It's this way, Rosie: You know my old man. He's all right except sometimes when he comes home not quite himself. You know what I mean." Yes, Rosie knew. In fact, like the rest of the world, she knew a great deal more than Janet supposed about Dave McFadden's drunken abuse of his wife and child. "He's all right when he's straight, Rosie, honest he is." Never before had Janet confessed in words, even to Rosie, that her father wasn't always sober. It was the fiction of life that she struggled most valiantly to maintain that this same father was the best and noblest of his kind. Poor Janet! In spite of herself Rosie experienced a pang of the old pity which thought of Janet's hard life always excited. But Janet was not striving to appeal to her thus. Slowly and painfully she was forcing herself to lay bare the little tragedy that shadowed her days....