Molly herself seemed to float through life like a big, beautiful moth, sailing serenely along, and now and then blundering into things, but never learning by experience the dangers of such blunders. One day, in the course of her inconsequent path through life, she would probably flutter too near the attractive blaze of some perilous fire, just as a moth flies against the flame of a candle and singes its frail, soft wings in the process.
It was of this that Sara was inwardly afraid, realizing, perhaps more clearly than the girl's overworked and sometimes absent-minded father, the risks attaching to her temperament.
Of late, Molly had manifested a certain moodiness and irritability very unlike her usual facile sweetness of disposition, and Sara was somewhat nonplussed to account for it. Finally, she approached the matter by way of a direct inquiry.
“What's wrong, Molly?”
Molly was hunched up in the biggest and shabbiest armchair by the fire, smoking innumerable cigarettes and flinging them away half-finished. At Sara's question, she looked up with a shade of defiance in her eyes.
“Why should anything be wrong?” she countered, obviously on the defensive.
“I don't know, I'm sure,” responded Sara good-humouredly. “But I'm pretty certain there is something. Come, out with it, you great baby!”
Molly sighed, smoked furiously for a moment, and then tossed her cigarette into the fire.
“Well, yes,” she admitted at last. “There is—something wrong.” She rose and stood looking across at Sara like a big, perplexed child. “I—I owe some money.”
Sara was conscious of a distinct shock.