The girls, swinging their feet encased in the flat, practical tennis shoes of the period, looked their usual momentary cold interest. Their heads, impertinently bobbed, or spectacularly "bunned," had abundant hair that covered bright enough little brains, but their mouths, trained into machine talk, dealt machine-like with little well-worn screws and cogs and belts of words, so that what they turned out was machine like; not related thought or challenging conversation, but trite sentences and inferences and ejaculations that made small circles of thought. Gertrude, the leader of the village girls, smiled dreamily at the car in question. "It's a good make, isn't it?" she said, then--"That firm's worth millions of dollars, they say, even in these after-the-war days." Minga nodded authoritatively, as one who knew. They all looked at her respectfully. "The Mede says that to drive that car is to drive molten gold," said Minga--it was understood that Minga spoke of her father as the Mede. No one knew exactly what the allusion meant, but it showed somehow that Minga was no slave to parental authority and that she "knew" history. "I want Dad to get a new car instead of a new piano," said Cynthia. "With the talking machine and George's cornet we don't really need a piano--but I do need a good roadster to--to get to the library and--and church," Cynthia inclined her head demurely. "Yah--Yah!" they all jeered. "To get to the library and church! Some getting, I'll say!" Dunstan looked up. "Whew!" he whistled, "to get to the beauty parlor, to the hashish joint, to the ice-cream palace, to the hooch chapel." "Yah!" they all laughed, Gertrude a little more spitefully than the others. Cynthia Bradon, a lithe, ripe blonde of sixteen, had had experiences with many things. It was known that she had had a few "shots" of morphine and would swallow, for a wager, many hectic and sulphuric beverages. She had run away and been unaccounted for for a week, she had been photographed in a bathing suit by a moving picture man. Cynthia was not sensitive, and her beauty, peach-like and of a glowing dewiness, seemed about the most harmless beauty in the world, because it covered so empty and so trivial a soul. Among the elders, she was considered a lost character. Among those who knew her she was known to be merely silly, lazy and untidy.