"Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do. I ought to answer some
advertisement for a typist--I can do that, but not stenography--and take
a regular job. The sort you said you'd shoot Mr. Whitney for offering
you. And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the
cross-town twenties and live on what I earned. That's the only thing I
can see, and, Rush, I simply haven't the courage to do it. It seems as
if I couldn't do it."

His lively horror at the bare suggestion of such a thing drew her into a
half-hearted defense of the project. Numbers of the girls she knew down
here who had been doing war work were going enthusiastically into things
like that--or at least were announcing an invincible determination to do
so. Only they were cleverer than she at that sort of thing and could hope
for better jobs. They were in luck. They liked it--looked forward to a
life of it as one full of engaging possibilities. But to Mary it was
nothing, she hardly pretended, but a forlorn last shift. If one couldn't
draw nor write nor act nor develop some clever musical stunt, what else
was there for a girl to do?

"Well, of course," said Rush, in a very mature philosophical way and
lighting a cigarette pretty deliberately between the words,--"of course,
what most girls do, is--marry somebody." Then he stole a look around at
his sister to see how she had taken it.

There was a queer look that almost frightened him in her blue eyes. Her
lips, which were trembling, seemed to be trying to smile.

"That's father's idea," she said raggedly. "He's as anxious now that I
should marry somebody--anybody, as he was that I shouldn't five years