sure of something good every time I talked and as if she liked my line and me. When you're decidedly slow and ordinary, that makes quite a hit.
I sat figuring out her life. Put her down as twenty-two; then she was born during the year Janvier was out after his first term in the "long house" and while he was busy engraving the plates which sent him in again. Some one—she hadn't said who—took her into the country for ten years. Maybe she had a mother then; maybe not; her mother had dropped out somewhere. She was about twelve, then, when her father got out again and began his famous "living Cleveland" series of engravings.
Twelve, they say, is the child's most impressionable age; the parent or guardian molds the future then.
Now I knew nothing about the guardian, when the parent was in the "long house," but I had considerable information about father; and I could imagine him emerging from the pen all filled with eagerness to be back at his game of showing up the government engravers and of getting away with what he'd tried twice.
Wally Bailey had given me a graphic glimpse
