Sard was accustomed to these cheerful little exits made with the bustling manner of one with much business on hand. When Miss Aurelia wanted to evade anything——Suddenly it flashed over the girl, "Why, she's always like that, she—she—never meets anything; she wouldn't discuss it with me that morning I tried to talk with her about Colter. She has pretended all along she didn't know about Colter, and now, with Dora crying there, red-eyed while she serves the meals, she tried not to know that—why," Sard's eyes opened, "I'm old, she's young."
"I ought to be her aunt," said the young girl to herself. "I ought to be sending her in a picture hat with an organdy dress and blue sash to meet Minga."
The girl stood motionless in the center of the floor, thinking. When youth begins to think and to think clearly and hard with its brave young mind, it is time for the world to take notice—Sard frowning at the floor, spoke aloud:
"Yes—that's living Under the Law," she said slowly, "I see what Dora meant; we live under a made law, we don't build up on it, away from it, to a better law; we just live, cramped, confined, ignorant, stupid, under it—Under the Law, that's it!!!" Sard laughed a little wonderingly. "I shall meet Minga this afternoon and we will go motoring and laughing over the country roads and Dunce will come home and we'll all eat fudge and dance to the Victrola to-night, and one or two of the bunch will come in and we'll play Rookie and Cheat and Toddle Top, and then at nine o'clock Minga will want a nut sundae, and we'll all pile into a machine and slew around to Dingman's and eat sundaes and then hoot along the roads until a tire pops and we think it time to go to bed, because under the law that is our privilege.
"But in that little top room Dora will wake up and think about her brother, who, she says, is Under the Law——" Sard looked out of the open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up; surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law."
CHAPTER VI
MINGA'S LAWS
Minga arrived in a spasm of long thin legs, short skimpy skirt, a fluff of bobbed curls, a rather unnatural whiteness of face, lugging a suitcase, golf sticks and tennis racket with the independent gestures of an experienced baggagesmasher. It was an effect calculated to impress a girl's camp or a parcel of immigrants, but as that of the arrival of a maiden of eighteen summers at a quiet house in the little center of Willow Roads, it was hardly distinguished.