Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II CALIFORNIA DAYS A BRITTLE winter sunlight glittered in at the afternoon windows of a small uptown apartment, and met its spirit of bright vigor halfway. It discovered one occupant poised on the top of a step- ladder and tweaking a picture's wire; the other standing below, her head cocked, her long fingers pressed downward against her long hips, in an attitude of critical observation. "Down on the right there no, that's too much, Bec. I can't see through you, child! Duck!" Bec crouched upon the step, protesting, nevertheless. "You're so particular, Helen darling! What if it is just a teeny, weeny crooked " She sprang upright again, and fluttered by some miraculous movement to the floor—a movement that seemed to spurn descent by steps—and alighted like a wide-winged butterfly. "I'm too happy to care whether a picture is straight or crooked! What does it matter?" Her arm encircled the other's waist, and she whirled. "Helen dearest, isn't the whole apartment simply wonderful ? Don't let's work any more to-day—let's just gloat!" The other laughed in her indulgent way. "Which means, 'I'll run away and play, and somehow the work will do itself." Again that odd mixture of cynical insight and fatuous doting noted once by a young man on a ferryboat. "All right—run along. Anna will help me." "But I didn't mean to crawl out! I'll stay, dear—truly I will!" Penitence inspired a violent embrace. "No—go for your walk, before dark. And to tell the truth, I think I may get on more expeditiously with Anna." Helen drove the girl off—much like driving a capricious butterfly, the task was; as when a winged creature dashes here, there, everywhere except out the door that you hold open, and returns to hover, and flutters in your face till you are distracted, and ...