suddenly for such a consciousness—but a warm tingling went through him as he gazed at her imperious, self-confident youth. Part of his mind was thinking much the same thought that Hunt had considered a few hours earlier: here were the makings of a magnificent adventuress.
“Maggie,” he mused, “you didn't get your looks from your father. You must have had a fine-looking mother.”
“I don't know—I never saw her,” she returned shortly.
“Poor kid,” Larry mused on—“and with only Old Jimmie for a father.” She did not know what to say. For a long time she had dreamed of this man as her hero; she had dreamed of splendid adventures with him in which she should win his praise. And now—and now—
He switched to another subject.
“So you have decided to string along with your father and Barney?”
“I have.”
“Don't you do it, Maggie.”
“Don't you preach, Larry.”
“I'm not preaching. I'm just talking business to you. The same as I talked business to myself. The crooked game is a poor business for a woman who can do something else—and you can do something else. I've known a lot of women in the crooked game. They've all had a rotten finish, or are headed for one. So forget it, Maggie. There's more in the straight game.”
She had swiftly come to feel herself stronger and wiser than her ex-hero. In her tremendous pride and confidence of eighteen, she regarded him almost with pitying condescension.
“Something's softened your brain, Larry. I know better. The people who pretend to go straight are just fakes; they're playing a different kind of a smooth game, that's all. Everybody is out to get his, and get it the easiest and quickest way he can. You know that's so. And that's just what I am going to do.”
Larry had once talked much the same way, but it seemed puzzlingly strange just now to hear such talk from a young girl. Then he understood.
“You
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