Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/201

 fact was that, although her fresh, innocuous face, her even, white teeth, her saccharine smile, and her dark hair had graced the covers of half the popular magazines half-a-dozen times each, a state of affairs which convinced her that she was as celebrated in her own sphere as Gloria Swanson in hers, not one of the men in the Moloch Club had recognized her, notwithstanding the fact that her portrait had appeared on the very periodicals they were most in the habit of reading.

Born in a small Michigan town, the daughter of a local druggist, she owed her queer Christian name to the pungent, red berries which dot the moss-covered soil in the great pine-forests of that state. Her mother had always nourished a desire for these miniature fruits and, during the period of her daughter's gestation, she had cried out for them incessantly. In the last hours of her confinement she had screamed Wintergreen so lustily that it seemed predestined that the child should bear the name.

The mother had died in childbirth, and from that time on the father had neglected his profitable drug-business in order to indulge a secret conviction that he was a great inventor. Silas Waterbury's fantastic inventions—it will suffice to state that one of them was an extraordinary formula for metamorphosing grass into milk without the aid of a cow—came to nothing, and when the improvident druggist died, the heavy mortgages on such property as he apparently still possessed—he had borrowed