"You have got to come in here and listen to me," commanded the young woman, who had been posing as a young girl. She grasped the arm of Marian, the latter frightened to the point of running away. "Do you think you can leave me like this?"
"But, Dolorez," begged Marian, "I did not promise to do anything I have not done. I got all the girls to agree to take treatments----"
"Yes, but what you should have done was to get that firey little Allen out of the way. She has spoiled everything. Now, what am I to do with all this junk," indicating a miscellaneous collection of stuff, misnamed furniture, that glared at both girls from piles and heaps in all four corners of the disordered room.
"You seem to forget, Miss Vincez, that it is I who am really suffering from all this," spoke Marian with prideable hauteur. "I have gotten myself all but expelled from college, I have lost every friend, and I have done something, the result of which I am afraid to--to contemplate. And now you are going to charge me with failing you!"
A scornful laugh accompanied by the shrugging of a pair of over-developed shoulders, was Marian's answer. Dolorez was an adventurer--and Marian her latest victim!
"You are very squeamish, it seems to me for one in your place," sneered the Brazilian. "What about your debts?"
"Oh!" gasped the overwrought Marian. "Please don't!"
To express at least conditional pity for Marian Seaton is but human. She had made flagrant mistakes, but after all she was only a poor, neglected girl. Neglected by a foolish, frivolous mother, and variously indulged or rashly disciplined by a father, who made his money storming the business world through the medium of over-worked and underpaid employees. His blustering ill-trained nature had served him in a way with factory workers, but it was not the sort of method from which to expect success when applied to a young, good-looking and ambitious girl, his only daughter Marian. Not knowing what it was she missed in her short life, the girl, now stood confronted with a record of deceit, and debts, and school dishonor. We will not yet condemn her without at least a trial.
The two, Marian and Dolorez, had stormed and threatened, until it was clear neither could hope to obtain any satisfaction from the other, under such conflict. Marian finally broke away literally from her captor, who now stood in the doorway of the ill-fated beauty parlor, glaring after the vanishing figure, all the venomous hatred, and avengeful threats glaring from her black eyes, and striking through the ill-natured lines of her Latin features.
"You will hear from me later, my high-strung American," she all but hissed. "I do not admit a bunch of feather-headed girls are better fighters than I."