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 person he enjoyed. Her intimate name was Peg, and her vitality was inexhaustible, and she was famous from Cape Cod to the North Shore as the girl who had once captured a live goldfish from a fountain in a hotel lobby and swallowed it whole (to mention only one of numerous astonishing escapades). She was piquant rather than pretty—"cute" was the adjective invariably applied by contemporaries of both sexes—with light clipped hair, indigo eyes, an up-tilted nose that seemed to be eternally sniffing some delicious odor, and the figure of a little boy.

The Allens dwelt in one of those houses on Beacon Street that look as though only dour-faced, desiccated maiden ladies in black taffeta should come into or go out of them. Bones himself ill-fitted this atmosphere, but Peg fitted it worse. She was to it an unpardonable anomaly, like a saxophone at a funeral. . . . Jock spent five days there, and lively days they were. They began with breakfast at noon, and proceeded thence at a spanking pace through matinees, skating parties, motoring parties, tea dances, dinner dances and roadhouse dances, back to bed again at three or four or thereabouts. To all festivities Jock escorted Peg, by mutual agreement and with wholesale disregard on her part of "dates" prearranged, and Bones and some lovely moron accompanied them.

Jock liked Peg tremendously for her diablerie and recklessness and perpetual high spirits. It was not until the third day of his visit that he discovered a serious side that made him like her all the better.

On the afternoon of that day there fell a slight lull in carnival, and she demanded that he come and talk to her in the Reprobate's Retreat.

The name was, of course, Peg's, and the room was also Peg's—so individually hers that one's clearest