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“Take that back! Call me anything but like that overrated, underbred gyastyockus!”

“I thought he was a great poet,” Pearl Jane said, wonderingly. “I never read any of his”

“Don’t!” Post said, “I forbid it. There’s enough for you, yet unread. Pearl Jane, dear, without touching that Purple Jellyfish!”

“Some of his poems are fine,” Kate began, but Locke interrupted her:

“Only one—‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is a great poem, but nothing else of his is worthy of consideration.”

Kate Vallon began to quote:

“Oh, I hate it!” Pearl Jane shuddered. “If it’s like that, I don’t want to read it!”

“No, you don’t,” Locke agreed; “besides, he’s out of date now. You stick to your John Masefield and Carl Sandburg.”

“I don’t know them very well,” the girl acknowledged, “they’re rather hard, I think.”

Now Pearl Jane Cutler was by no means a child or an ignoramus. But she had been simply brought up in a small town, and though fairly well grounded in the rudiments of Life and Literature, she had still quite a bit to learn, and was swallowing it in chunks—anaconda like. She was twenty-two, and carried a little more flesh on her young bones than the average all-city girl did. Kate Vallon, half a dozen years older, was keeping an eye on her,