Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

"Anyway," said Minga, "I sort of see things different. I can't seem to want to visit around as much as I used. I'm going home to be a daughter, that sort of thing."

"Oh, deliver us!" groaned Dunstan. "Oh my soul! Say, what's the matter, girl, didn't your last allowance come? Nobody's a daughter nowadays; it isn't done. Say, Minga, this is awful! Anyway—don't go!"

Minga stood first on one foot, then on the other. In her mind, a little dazed and haunted by recent events, still rang Shipman's summing up of her after their various encounters, and the final night at the dance. The lawyer had held the two tantalizing hands very tightly and murmured, "You are a very dear little thing, a very dear little thing." He had said it with a sort of tortured groan. Minga was beginning to realize with a good deal of slow pain how a man might resolutely hold a girl like her away from himself and herself, from something to which, the girl was clever enough to know, she had half unconsciously tried to lure him. The sentence with its tender repudiation of her had penetrated to something honest in her heart. Then had come the morning outside the court-house when Shipman had defined life to them. The older man's power, his penetrating analysis, had somehow reached to the soul that lay dormant, the little butterfly character had sleepily stirred, the little blue egg had broken, and Minga, a scared soul, looked forth upon a universe that had a spiritual endlessness. Some new dim sense of men came to her, not as strong creatures that must be made silly slaves to women or played upon by light motives, but as loyal brothers who had enormous power of strength or suffering through women. Watts Shipman's world of standards and honor stood out to her like a strange austere country of mountains and looming towers as to which she was supremely curious, but into which her feet hardly knew how to tread.

Minga looked earnestly at Dunstan's back. "You see," she worked this out as she had once worked it out with Sard, "you see, Dunce, whether we like it or not, we've got to get busy, us young ones. It's queer," said little Minga with an omniscience not to be despised, "but though the grown-ups try all they can to discourage us when we do take hold, they know as well as we do that we've got to take hold. We," said Minga, with awed prophecy, "our kind, the Bunches, don't you know, all over the world. The French Bunch, like us, the Italian Bunch, the English Bunch, the flappers of the world. Our Bunches have got to run the world; it's awful, it's queer, but," the little bobbed head nodding violently, "it's true; so we ought to be preparing. The fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles and things hate to have us take hold before they tell us what to do. Though you can see," said Minga solemnly, "that they don't half of them know what to do themselves. So we have got to take hold." The bobbed maiden was sober to a terrifying degree. Dunstan stared at the little mouth that summed up, "And I suppose for this reason we ought to sort of brace up and begin to take notice. Now, for instance," said Minga with a sudden virtuous decision, "I've made up my mind that love is divine; I'm not going to fool any more. Love is divine," announced Minga.

"Wow!" said Dunstan, "don't hit me there again, as the lady said."

"Yes, it is," returned his car-washing companion determinedly. "I—I—I've grown sick of these petting parties and all this silly stuff. When you really don't care you—you just don't do it, so I'm going to cut out these fake engagements just to wear different kinds of rings—I—I—if love is really divine," said Minga, she looked half timidly off to the mountain where the organ builder's house stood, "why, those petting parties are kind of common; do you get me?"

"Do I get you?" ejaculated Dunstan. "Say," he straightened up, "if you knew what I knew. Say, I could tell you things, Minga."

Minga, her resolutions almost overcoming her, sat down on an upturned box. "I really feel different," she said solemnly. "After that night Tawny Troop bawled me out, and—and something else happened, well, I got a sort of different feeling. Now, for instance," said Minga, "old people; I don't want to make fun of them any more. Isn't that queer? I want to sort of study 'em and see what they mean. Imagine! I really want," went on Minga in an awed voice, "to hang around and talk seriously to Judgie, and—and queer unnatural things like that. I'm going to be a daughter and sort of get interested; isn't it awful?"

Dunstan walked lovingly around his car, trying all its functions, and cast an appreciative eye on his comrade. "Good stuff," he commended. "The old birds must have some sense packed away somewhere. The old-timers like to beat the air and say things, but they ain't so low in the grave but what they see a few facts too.

"Well," the youth stood up straight, hands in pockets, whistling softly, "the 'Green Bottle' is herself again, cleaned, curried and coddled. Got that letter? I'll go in and change my duds, and then I guess we're ready. What? You got Terry's letter all right?"