"Do you good women realize what time it is?" Miss Breckenridge
asked, by way of reply.
"Has she got it a shade too short?" speculated Rachael, thoughtful
eyes on the girl's dress.
"Well--I was wondering!" Carol said eagerly, flinging down her
wrap, to turn and twist before a door that was a solid panel of
mirror. "What do you think--we'll dance."
"Oh, not a bit," Rachael presently decided. "They're all up to the
knees this year, anyway. Car come round?"
"Long ago," said Billy, and Elinor, reaching for her own wrap,
declared herself ready. "I wish you were going, Rachael," the girl
added as she turned to follow their guest from the room.
"Come back here a moment, Bill," Mrs. Breckenridge said casually,
seating herself at the dressing-table without a glance at her
stepdaughter. For a moment Miss Breckenridge stood irresolute in
the doorway, then she reluctantly came in.
"You're just seventeen, Billy," said the older woman
indifferently. "When you're eighteen, next March, I suppose you
may do as you please. But until then--either see a little less of
Joe Pickering, or else come right out in the open about it, and
tell your father you want to see him here. This silly business of
telephoning and writing and meeting him, here, there, and
everywhere, has got to stop."
Billy stared steadily at her stepmother, her breath coming quick
and high, her cheeks red.
"Who said I met him--places?" she said, in a seventeen-year-old-
girl's idea of a tragic tone. Mrs. Breckenridge's answer to this
was a shrug, a smile, and a motherly request not to be a fool.
There was silence for a moment. Then Billy said recklessly: "I like him. And you can't make me deny it!"
"Like him if you want to," said Mrs. Breckenridge, "although what
you can see in a man twice your age--with his particular history--
However, it's your affair. But you'll have to tell your father."
Billy shut her lips mutinously, her cheeks still scarlet.
"I don't see why!" she burst forth proudly, at last.
To this Mrs. Breckenridge offered no argument. Carefully filing a
polished fingertip she said quietly: "I didn't suppose you would."
"And I think that if you tell him YOU interfere in a matter that
doesn't in the LEAST concern you," Billy pursued hotly,
uncomfortably eager to strike an answering spark, and reduce the
conversation to a state where mutual concessions might be in
order. "You have no BUSINESS to!"
Her stepmother was silent. She put on a ring, regarded it
thoughtfully on her spread fingers, and took it off again.
"In the first place," Billy said sullenly, "you'll tell him a lot
of things that aren't so!"