When Saturday night came he found Dot waiting at the entrance of the
Bijou Moving Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding
Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently
been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled.
Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy,
faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small,
irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark,
unenduring little flower--yet he thought he detected in her some quality
of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of
all things. In this he was mistaken.
Dorothy Raycroft was nineteen. Her father had kept a small, unprosperous
corner store, and she had graduated from high school in the lowest
fourth of her class two days before he died. At high school she had
enjoyed a rather unsavory reputation. As a matter of fact her behavior
at the class picnic, where the rumors started, had been merely
indiscreet--she had retained her technical purity until over a year
later. The boy had been a clerk in a store on Jackson Street, and on the
day after the incident he departed unexpectedly to New York.
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