"In wrong? How?"
"About her bein' who she is."
P. Sybarite subjected the open, naïf countenance of the shipping clerk to a prolonged and doubting scrutiny.
"No, I ain't crazy in the head, neither," George asseverated with some heat. "I suspicioned somethin' was queer about that girl right along, but now I know it."
"Explain yourself."
"Ah, it ain't nothin' against her! You don't have to scorch your collar. She's all right. Only—she 's in bad. I don't s'pose you seen the evenin' paper?"
"No."
"Well, I picked up the Joinal down to Clancey's—this is it." With an effective flourish, George drew the sheet from his coat pocket and unfolded its still damp and pungent pages. "And soon's I seen that," he added, indicating a smudged halftone, "I begun to wise up to that little girl. It's sure some shame about her, all right, all right."
Taking the paper, P. Sybarite examined with perplexity a portrait labelled "Marian Blessington." Whatever its original aspect, the coarse mesh of the reproducing process had blurred it to a vague presentment of the head and shoulders of almost any young woman with fair hair and regular features: only a certain, almost indefinable individuality in the pose of the head remotely suggested Molly Lessing.
In a further endeavour to fathom his meaning, the little bookkeeper conned carefully the legend attached to the putative likeness: