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Show 5 WAl YV Mrs. Harry Putfh Smith at that time, he was anything ex--dr-can'r-tellyiu lah"aB pel ef "it was when your her and I announced our engagement en-gagement and Henry abandoned the pursuit.." And then Mrs. Leigh caught him on the rebound?" "More or less." -She was his stenographer, wasn't she?" "She was very pretty in those davs," said Anne evasively. "Quite as'gorgeously blond as Priscilla. "And how she has got on! (To be continued) cried Janet breathlessly, because even to think such a thing was as if a fist had landed on her heart. "Listen, Janet," said Berenice, looking Intense, "you don't have to tell me that Mother's swell at making the best of a bad bargain, but don't kid yourself. I don't care how much you love a man, after you've been married a year or so you wonder where you ever got the idea that love makes up for everything." "Hullo," said Bill gruffly, tossing tos-sing his hat over on the overstuffed over-stuffed couch and scowling when Chapter Three Syiioils Jane t Phillips rinds herself left out. of things when her wealthier friends In Hay City come home from their finishing schools and colleges. I'rlscllla Leigh at the moment Interested In Janet's old Mend (iordon Key is making herself disagreeable. Jim Phillips, Janet's brother, has Just met redheaded, red-headed, wealthy, Helen Sanders lliroiigli pampered Howard Leigh. ,11m is subbing; us golf pro for the summer anil offers to give Miss Sanders lessons. Although he doesn't Ilk" ber, he Is fascinated. Meanwhile, Janet lias returned homo from her sister 15 lice's apartment, wondering if. after nil, love means little and money everything. every-thing. She complains of their lack of funds to her mother, pointing out Mis. Leigh's and "How she has got on!" "And here's where I set Bill down to another can of pork and beans," said Berenice. The moment the door closed behind be-hind hor friends. Berenice began emptying ash trays and disposing of highball glasses. "Would you mind carrying these ginger ale bottles out to the trash barrel In the hall, Janet?" she asked. "I don't dare leave them lying a-round a-round the apartment. Bill's a regular Sherlock Holmes at spotting spot-ting evidence." Janet felt a little sick. "Don't you think it's awfully cheap to do .things behind Bill's back?" she asked when she returned. "If Bill weren't so unreasonable I wouldn't have to," muttered Berenice, hastily putting the percolator per-colator on. She was a small, curved person with a dimple In her left cheek and skin like a gardenia. Her eyes were red-brown too and she had extravagant black lashes and lovely little feet and hands. To Janet, who was taller and whose black hair did not curl, Berenice had always seemed absurdly childish, child-ish, in spite of the three years' difference in their ages. "Bill is sweet when we are a-lono a-lono together," admitted Berenice and sighed. "No one could be sweeter, but he's so dreadfully narrow." Janet's voice was unsteady. "You aren't a very striking advertisement ad-vertisement for love in a cottage. I mean you were so in love with Bill I used to envy you. Now all the Icing seems to have come off the wedding cake, or has it?" t She did not know exactly why, but she needed desperately to be reassured about many things which until recently it had never occured to her to doubt. But there was nothing reassuring in the bitterness which hardened Berenice's piquant face so that all at once she looked years older. "Love's a lot of phooey, Janet," she said in a curt, disillusioned voice. "It's the honey with which nature baits the trap. For heaven's heav-en's sake, take me for example, or Mother, so far as that goes, and don't be the kind of saps we've been!" "I don't believe Mother regrets having married a poor man!" cried Janet. "It would be differ-ent differ-ent if you weren't a hundred times more refined than Prlscella Leigh or her mother will ever be." Anne flung her daughter a startled glance. "I don't mind being be-ing patronized by Jennie Leigh, Janet. I knew her when she lived with her folks back of their meat market and -thought it polite to pass the toothpicks to company. Not that she doesn't deserve worlds of credit for the way she toned down herough edges after she married Henry. Only she knows- I know about them and that's why she can't keep from trying to impress me with the fact that I may have been born to the purple, but it's she who's wearing it now, tra, la." Janet winced. "And I used to think that breeding and the quality qual-ity of your grain are what counts," she remarked bitterly. "They are," said her mother. "Oh, no, they're not," protested protest-ed Janet. "No one cares how vulgar you are inside if you can afford to go to expensive schools and run with a fashionable crowd. Priscilla Leigh would double-cross double-cross her best friend, but she'll be the most popular deb this season sea-son because her dad gives her gobs of spendnig money." "I think," said Anne slowly, "that Henry is generous with his children about money because it's all he has to give them." "You could have married him, couldn't you?" Anne smiled. "He left that im-' im-' pression."' "But you preferred a struggling young physician." Anne's freshly colored face sobered. so-bered. Janet was more like her mother than either of the other children. Both she and Janet had firm cleft chins and lustrous dark hair. Anne was as slender as her daughter, and unless very tired she looked much too young to have a son of twenty-four. "Yes," she said, "I distinctly preferred your father. You see, although Henry was well on his way to his first hundred thousand Mr. Jacoby who brought N up a huge bowl of hot soup which he had made himself, ignoring with fine courtesy the tears which slid down Anne's wan cheeks as she sat there at the kitchen table in her new widow's weeds. Janet on her lap, Berenice clinging to her arm, Jim trying to be manly though he was only ten, "Don't worry about the future," said Mr. Jacoby then. "God will give you strength to meet each day as it comes." It was trite counsel, and this Intellectual age is disposed to jeer at such simple faith as Mr. Jacoby's, yet it had comforted Anne Phillips. It still comforted her. She was smiling when she climbed the stairs to the second floor and unlocked her door. Anybody home?" she called out, her usual greeting.; "Just me," came Janet's clear young voice from the farthest regions re-gions of the flat. "Hello, derfrest," Anne murmured, mur-mured, reaching for the apron she kept hanging on the pantry door to slip over the smart black crepe dress which she wore to the store. "Hello, (Mums," said Janet. "Come on out and cool off. Supper's Sup-per's ready except the tea, and there's no use cracking the ice till Jim comes. I was going out after him but he telephoned that he'd drive in with Ruth." Janet was lying back in one of the canvas deck chairs which the family moved about from porch to porch as desired, stretched out full length, her arm flung up a-bove a-bove her head so that her face was in the shadow. There was dejection in the listless manner in which her long straight limbs were disposed. Anne Phillips felt the dawn of uneasiness. It was unlike Janet to droop. "Tired?" asked Anne, trying not to sound like the overanxious mother who nags her children to exasperation by an excess of solicitude. solici-tude. "A little." admitted Janet. Her mother waited with that uneasy spot inside her steadily growing but, whatever troubled her child, she was not ready to discuss it. "Have a hard day?" asked Janet. "No more than usual," said Anne and laughed. Mrs. Henry Leigh was in looking for a dinner dress. I turned the stock over for her. but nothing suited." "It makes me sick, your having to grin and bear people like that!" it landed on a pile of gayly colored color-ed magazines and slid to the floor. "Hello," said Berenice, putting a plate of sliced bread down on the table with an ungentle thump. "Janet, I didn't see you!" exclaimed ex-claimed Bill, his face lighting. "How's my nice li'l sister?" "All right, I guess," murmured Janet dubiously. All the members of Berenice's family were fond of Bill Carter. He was a big, self-concious young chap with thick black hair, a lock of which was continually falling down over his eyes. When he smiled he had an engaging boyish look which offset his protruding jaw and the stubborn line of his mouth. "Going to feed with us?" he asked. Janet shook her head. "I have to go out to the club for Jim." Bill was staring at the table on which Berenice had just deposited with another thump a slender platter of warmed-over beans. "You're lucky," he said to Janet. "We're supping out of a tin can as usual." Berenice sniffed. "I'll say she's lucky. Nothing on her mind except ex-cept what dress she'll wear to the dance tonight. Single girls have all the luck." Bill scowled. "As you've mentioned men-tioned before." Janet glanced from Bill's lowering lower-ing black eyes to Berenice's flushed flush-ed cheeks and she swallowed painfully. pain-fully. "I guess I'll run on," she stammered. "You can't be blamed for getting get-ting out before we start throwing things," said Bill, the corners of his mouth turning down like clamps. "Yes," said Berenice, pushing a cair violently up to the table. Janet left them glaring at each other across the narrow expanse of the dinette, as if it were a No Man's land lined with the barbed wire of their hostility. Anne Phillips walked home from work that afternoon. The building in which she lived was a three-storied brick structure with two flats to a floor. It had been built in the days before real estate es-tate men considered it imperative to utilize every available foot of ground for income purposes, and stood well hack from the street with a neat lawn in front and a deep back yard. Each flat had a large front and back porch but there were no elevators or incinerators incin-erators in the building. "I know it dates me," Anne admitted ad-mitted to her friends, "but I'd rather climb stairs and run out to the alley with trash than to give up my old-fashioned big kitchen and my porch boxes." Anne's flower boxes lined the railings on both porches of her flat and kept her busy nine months mon-ths in the year. It was true she managed to have something in bloom from early spring to late fall, and she even grew radishres and lettuce and shallots In the box by the kitchen door. Old Mr. Jacob- was sitting on the front stoop reading the afternoon after-noon paper when Anne came up the walk. He was seventy, a withered with-ered little old gentleman with a courtly manner. He "bached," as he expressed it, in two neat housekeeping house-keeping rooms in the basement and looked after the furnace in the winter and the lawn In the summer. "Good evening, Miss Anne," he called out. "Warmer today, ain't it? Ought to be fine for them Shasta daisies of yours." Anne smiled. "And for your rheumatism." "Nope." he said, "it's not so good. We can look for rain within with-in twenty-four hours." Anne chuckled. "I'll carry my umbrella tomorrow." Mr. Jacoby claimed that his trick knee was an infallible barometer bar-ometer of weather conditions. Som-e of the younger generation In the building made fun of his prognostications, but not Anne. She could never forget the daze she had been when she moved her fatherless little brood Into the flat, a daze in which nothing seemed real to her except that raw new grave where she had buried her carefree youth. It was |