man in the world and will keep on being so—if I don't disgrace him or let others ruin him."
What a distortion of this girl's wrestle with herself to say that she was not trying to do right, Gregg thought.
"Here we were, Gregg, just about ideally happy, any one would say," she went on. "Life seemed a perfectly plain, pleasant matter for us; we were all well and normal; father was doing wonderfully well in business; he was coming along awfully fast and making lots of friends; everybody was talking about him and saying he could do anything and go anywhere! Mother was accomplishing what she liked and was making friends and everybody said what a wonderful woman she was. Why, if I'd been a boy, I'd have been sure the way to make my life a success was to follow in father's footsteps; being a girl, I supposed my mother's ways were just about right. I hadn't meant to follow her particular tastes, of course; I had my own; but I had meant to become a woman—a wife—in much the way she had. Why she—he—we three seemed to have absolutely everything; and then came that telephone call—and it's gone, Gregg; it's all gone, just like that."
"All what?" demanded Gregg.
"Your confidence in the ideals you'd held before you and which you came to suppose were the biggest and most attractive in life; for another sort of attraction has beaten them. Of course, I'd heard about that. I'd read newspapers full of how men, who had everything, ruined themselves for it; but I always believed there was something held back in those stories and something not told about the men. Anyway, I never dreamed it could appeal to a man like my father. I simply
