was to have been her name. Arline Kildane. Sweet, don't you think, and
with just a bit of wild Irish rose in it?

But Hester Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little,
elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to
blow my pitch pipe for a minor key.

Not that Hester's isn't one of the oldest stories in the world, too. No
matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks
younger than love--and how often the two are interchangeable!

If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or
a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two
charges.

She was neither. The most that can be said for her is that she was
honestly what she was.

"If the wages of sin is death," she said to a roadhouse party of
roysterers one dawn, "then I've quite a bit of back pay coming to me."
And joined in the shout that rose off the table.

I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed
lines of her very, very old story. Whose pasts so quickly mold and
disintegrate as those of women of Hester's stripe? Their yesterdays are
entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.

For the first seventeen years of her life she lived in what we might
call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants.
Her particular one was in Ohio. Demopolis, I think. One of those