"But in that little top room Dora will wake up and think about her brother, who, she says, is Under the Law----" Sard looked out of the open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up; surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law." CHAPTER VI MINGA'S LAWS Minga arrived in a spasm of long thin legs, short skimpy skirt, a fluff of bobbed curls, a rather unnatural whiteness of face, lugging a suitcase, golf sticks and tennis racket with the independent gestures of an experienced baggagesmasher. It was an effect calculated to impress a girl's camp or a parcel of immigrants, but as that of the arrival of a maiden of eighteen summers at a quiet house in the little center of Willow Roads, it was hardly distinguished. The meeting of the two girls was a curious clinched clasp done technically and punctuated by gasps, long, over-emphasized kisses and such half-shrieked protests as: "Oh, you dear brute, you're squeezing the life out of me--You silly old darned duck--Oh, Honey, isn't this great?" Then they fell apart, and with mutual cool glance of appraisement took each other in. As they turned talking and went up the long stairs, Sard's look was laughingly interrogative. "Minga, you've bobbed your hair." "Yes, you like it? The Mede and Persian don't! I had an awful row with the Mede, meaning Dad, but he came around, of course." Sard looked lovingly at the little curly head; she felt of the thick knot at the back of her own young head and felt somehow old; she tossed it like an impatient colt. "It must feel nice." "It feels like October wind blowing over the pink heather," Minga laughed; she passed an arm around the older girl. "Let's go up town and get yours done right away. What do you want with hammocks of long hair? Why, if Absalom had only had his hair bobbed, the whole Bible would have been changed." The voices of the girls had a curious cadence of indolence, also a rising sense of potential shriek, yet they were not raucous.