Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/39

 sensible ones know it. He's the real energy and brains in Tri-Lake to-day; he's the reason it's twice as big as it ever was before and increasing when every other business, just about, is dropping down toward the dogs, and there's never a whisper about profiteering and bribe-paying or anything else rotten in Tri-Lake these days. Oh, I'm so proud of him! After mother telephoned him about our party, and who was coming, he brought home this for me." Marjorie touched the sapphire on the chain about her neck.

"It's beautiful," Gregg said, "on you."

"Wait until you see what he brought mother! She got me this dress, which has simply scandalized Billy. Do you think it's so awful?"

Gregg started because she had caught him thinking about it. On another evening, he believed he would not have wondered particularly over it; but to-night the bareness of her slender arms and shoulders and the partial, studied exposure of her rounded, youthful breasts in this new dress which her mother had bought for her gave him a queer feeling. And the queerer because Marjorie was so plainly almost wholly unconscious of the final effect for which such a dress was designed. Whenever Gregg thought about how much a girl like Marjorie "knew," he realized very well that girls to-day "know" almost everything; but he had never thought before how little mere knowledge of itself has to do with nocence [sic] or with innocence. Suddenly it struck him that, whatever she might "know," he was standing before the most innocent girl in the world and for her very sophistication far more innocent than girls of the generations before who had been kept wholly ignorant. For they had known that there was a vague, undescribed something to fear; but this girl