sixty centuries since history began to be written. Oh, he was trying
to say a lot in this portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less
than ordinary--in her cheap shirt-waist and skirt!

And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this
Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be
a petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence. She
had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful.
Her possessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered
at, with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a
landlady, and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney Palmer
and this returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.

But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if she
developed her possibilities. With her looks, her boldness, her
cleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress. As he
painted, he wondered what she was going to do, and become; and he
watched her not only with a painter's eye intent upon the present, but
with keen speculation upon the future.




CHAPTER III


Presently Hunt's mind shifted to Larry Brainard, whom Barney Palmer
and Old Jimmie Carlisle had come here to see. Hunt had a mind curious
about every thing and every one; and blustering, bullying creature
though he was, he had the gift, possessed by but few, of audaciously