FROM THE LIFE
the connecting door to conceal it, but sometimes, when he had locked himself in, he moved the bed aside and went into the other room and pretended that she was there with him.
Then she returned for the holidays and the thing began to be serious. She had been unhappy at the school. The other girls were all daughters of the well-to-do; she had put on the pride of poverty in her association with them, and they had retaliated as Centerbrook would have retaliated if it had had the opportunity. She had made no friends. She could not appeal for sympathy to her mother, whose ideal of character was not exactly sympathetic. And it was impossible to appeal to her father; her mother had always been between them in the family administration. So she poured it all out to Con. He took it greedily and consoled her with the whispers of adolescent love. They began meeting at night, after the others of the household were in bed. She came to his room.
9
Well, as I say, the middle of their story was missing from his account of it. The end of it came first; and it only ran back as far as the time when he left school to go to work. She tried to persuade him to continue his studies, but he was too impatient; he was eager to earn money, to make himself rich, so that they might be married the sooner. That was why he gave up driving the
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