couldn't help having such ideas, Maggie, living among crooks ever since you were a kid. Why, Old Jimmie could not have used better methods, or got better results, if he had set out consciously to make you a crook.” Then a sudden possibility came to him. “D'you suppose he could always have had that plan—to make you into a crook?” he asked.
“What difference does that make?” she demanded shortly.
“A funny thing for a father to do with his own child,” Larry returned. “But whether Jimmie intended it or not, that's just what he's done.”
“What I am, I am,” she retorted with her imperious defiance. Just then she felt that she hated him; she quivered with a desire to hurt him: he had so utterly destroyed her romantic hero and her romantic dreams. Her hands clenched.
“You talk about going straight—it's all rot!” she flamed at him. “A lot of men say they're going straight, but no one ever does! And you won't either!”
“You think I won't?”
“I know you won't! You don't know how to do any regular work. And, besides, no one will give a crook a chance.”
She had unerringly placed her finger upon his two great problems, and Larry knew it; he had considered them often enough.
“All the same, I'm going to make good!” he declared.
“Oh, no, you're not!”
Perhaps he was stirred chiefly by the sting of her taunting tongue, by the blaze of her dark, disdainful eyes; and perhaps by the changed feeling toward this creature whom he had left a half-grown girl and returned to find a woman. At any rate, he crossed and seized her wrists and gazed fiercely down upon her.
“I tell you, I'm going to go straight, and I'm going to make a success of it! You'll see!” And then he added dominantly: “What's more, I'm going to make you go straight, too!”
She made no attempt to free herself, but blazed up at him defiantly. “You'll make me do nothing. I'm going to be just what I said, and I'm going to make a success of it. Just wait—I'll prove to you what I can do! And you—you'll be a failure, and
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