Flaming Youth

CHAPTER I

"Here's to Prohibition," said their concoctor in his suave voice, before drinking; "and to your better health, my dear."

"A toi," she responded carelessly. "Leave the shaker, will you, Ralph? Bob and I are talking."

Fentriss nodded and went. A moment later the concert grand in the big living room below stairs responded to a touch at once delicate, strong and distinctive.

"How I used to love his music!" said Mona Fentriss half to herself; "and still do," she added. "Bob." She turned upon her physician with laughing reproach in her eyes. "Don't you know better, after all these years, than to try to keep me from doing anything I want to do? I always get what I want."

"If you don't, it's not for lack of trying."

"I don't even have to try very hard. Life has been a generous godfather to me. But I've always wanted more. Like Oliver Twist, wasn't it? Or Jephthah's daughter?"

Dr. Osterhout grinned. "It was the horse leech's daughters that were always crying 'Give! Give!'"

[Pg 10]
"Why cry for it? Reach out and help yourself," she said gaily. "Them's my principles. And now the fairy godfather is going to cut me off with a shilling. Or a year. Or less."

"Unless you obey orders it'll be considerably less."

"Let it! I'd rather do as I please while it lasts.

"'I've taken my fun where I found it,
I've rogued and I've ranged in my time,'"
sang Ralph Fentriss at the piano below to music of his own composing.

"So have I," murmured his wife. Her eyes grew brilliant, craving, excited as they wandered to the flower-decked mantel upon which stood half a dozen photographs. All were of men. Though they varied in age and indications of character, they presented a typical similarity in being well-groomed and attractive. They might all have belonged to the same club. "Bob, do many women confess to their doctors?"

"Lots."

"To you?"

"No. I don't let 'em."

"Why not? I should think it would be interesting."

"It's only a trick to gratify the senses through recollection," said the blunt physician. "Reflected lechery."

"You know too much, Bob. Then you won't be my father confessor?"

"I doubt if you could tell me much," he said slowly.

A smile, unabashed and mischievous, played upon her lips. "That's an ambiguous sort of answer. Sometimes I suspect that very little gets past you."

"I'm trained to observation," he remarked.

"And to silence. So you're safe. I think it would do[Pg 11] me good to confess to you." She grew still and pensive. "Bob, if I'd been a Roman Catholic do you suppose I'd have been—different?"

"Doubted. Would you want to be?"

"I don't really know that I would. Anyway I'm what I had to be. We all are."

"Fatalism is a convenient excuse."

"No; but I am," she insisted. "It's temperament. Temperament is fate. For a woman, anyway," she added with a flash of insight. "You don't blame me, do you? I couldn't help it, could I?"

He smiled down at her, tolerant but uncompromising.

"Oh, don't stand there looking like God," she fretted. "Do you know what I'd resolved to do? Will you laugh at me if I tell you?"