a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply. He would buy a flask of whisky and they would drink it very quietly. Perhaps they talked a little more. But they were never riotous. Occasionally, they would rise at midnight from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under leafy trees. They would not return during the night. Eliza, ironing out a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen. Presently, she would mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert’s room, and descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.
She had to speak these things to Helen. There was a strange defiant communion between them. They laughed or were bitter together.
“Why, of course,” said Helen, impatiently, “I’ve known it all along.” But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold— laced teeth half-shown in her open mouth, the child look of belief, wonder, skepticism, and hurt innocency in her big highboned face.
“Do you suppose he really does? Oh surely not mama. She’s old enough to be his mother.”
Across Eliza’s white puckered face, thoughtful and reproving, a sly smile broke. She rubbed her finger under the broad wings of her nose to conceal it, and snickered.
“I tell you what!” she said. “He’s a chip off the old block. His father over again,” she whispered. “It’s in the blood.”
Helen laughed huskily, picking vaguely at her chin, and gazing out across the weedy garden.
“Poor old Ben!” she said, and her eyes, she did not know why, were sheeted with tears. “Well,’Fatty’s' a lady. I like her—I don’t care who knows it,” she added defiantly. “It’s their business anyway. They’re quiet about it. You’ve got to say that much for them.”
She was silent a moment.
“Women are crazy about him,” she said. “They like the quiet ones, don’t they? He’s a gentleman.”
Eliza shook her head portentously for several moments.
“What do you think!” she whispered, and shook her pursed lips again. “Always ten years older at least.”
“Poor old Ben!” Helen said again.
