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 FLAMING Again

she laughed,

YOUTH

showing

little, even,

13 animal-like

teeth. “No; the other thing.” “I believe whatever you want me to.” “Meaning that you reserve your own opinion. But you’re a staunch friend, anyway. . . . The trouble with me is that I was born too soon. I really belong with this wild young age that’s coming on the stage just as I’m going off; with the girls. Listen!” Below

stairs Fentriss,

still at the piano, had

swung

into the rhythms of the Second Rhapsody, wild and broken as white water seething through a rock-beset gorge. “That’s the measure they dance to, the new generation. Doesn’t it get into your torpid blood, Bob? Don’t you wish you were young again? To be a desperado of twenty! They’re all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins; the girls as well as the boys; maybe more than the boys. Even Connie with her eyes of a vesta]. Ah!” A new note had merged with the music, a hoarse, child-

ish croon, following the mad measure with an interwoven recitative. “That’s Patricia. She’s dancing to it.” “How can you tell?” asked the physician. “By the way she’s singing. Little devil! I wonder what it’ll be like by the time she’s grown up,” mused the mother. “Which won’t be so long, now.” “So it won’t. I keep forgetting that. She seems such a baby. What a queer little creature it is, Bob!” ‘“She’s a terror. But there’s something lovable about her, too. A touch of you in her,.Mona.” “Qf me? She’s no more like me than I’m like my namesake of the well-known Lisa family. Nor like the older