"D'yer love him?" the dentist persisted, not ungently.
"Should I be here if I did?" she flashed resentfully. "I was a country girl away at school, more foolish than one of those dumb Swedes in my class, and he—"
But she turned again to the window, with an impatient gesture.
"It is something wrong in a woman," she murmured. "But she has no chance, no chance. I can't tell you now all the things."
"Well," the dentist said soothingly, "let's see just how bad it is. Has your boss, the superintendent, or the principal spoke to you, turned you out? I see the reporter went around to the school, nosing after something."
"They'd just transferred me—miles south," she answered indifferently. "I was glad of it. I don't have to meet the spying, talking teachers, and think all the time the pupils know it from their parents. They're all foreigners where I am now. They say the Everglade school is the next thing to the last. It's a kind of Purgatory, where they keep you for a few months before they dismiss you."
"I didn't know any one was ever dismissed from a Chicago school," the dentist remarked.
"Oh, sometimes when the superintendents or the supervisors don't want you. There is a supervisor in the Everglade district—" she stopped a moment, and then continued tranquilly—"he was very intimate at first. I thought he wanted to help me to get on in the school. But he wanted—other things. Perhaps when he doesn't—succeed—that will be the end."
"It'll blow over," the dentist said encouragingly. "If the supervisor troubles you much, I'll see Mahoney. You've changed your boarding-place?"
"Yes—but," she admitted in a moment, "they know it at the hospital."