Something sweet. Something dainty. A candied rose-leaf after all is the bitter war-lozenges. A miss. A kiss. A golf-stick. A motor-car. Or, if need be, a bit of khaki, but without one single spot of blood or mud, and nicely pressed as to those fetching peg-top trouser effects where they wing out just below the skirt-coat. The oldest story in the world told newly. No wear out to it. Editors know. It’s as staple as eggs or printed lawn or ipecac. The good old-fashioned love story with the above-mentioned miss, kiss and, if need be for the sake of timeliness, the bit of khaki, pressed. Just my luck that, with one of these most salable tales in the world at the tip of my pink pencil, Hester Bevins should come pounding and clamoring at the door of my mental reservation, quite drowning out the rather high, the lipsy, and, if I do say it myself, distinctly musical patter of Arline. That was to have been her name. Arline Kildane. Sweet, don’t you think, and with just a bit of wild Irish rose in it? But Hester Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little, elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to blow my pitch-pipe for a minor key. Not that Hester’s isn’t one of the oldest stories in the world, too. No matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks younger than love--and how often the two are interchangeable! There is another Hester in fiction who wore a literal scarlet letter, but she is sprung from the brain of genius, from whence all immortal brain-children are born. My poor Hester is of far less fertile gray matter, but here she is as she is. If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two charges. She was neither. The most that can be said for her is that she was honestly what she was. “If the wages of sin is death,” she said to a road-house party of roysterers one dawn, “then I’ve quite a bit of back pay coming to me.” And joined in the shout that rose off the table. I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed lines of her very, very old story. Whose pasts so quickly mold and disintegrate as those of women of Hester’s stripe? Their yesterdays are entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.