She had quarrelled with her grandfather and he would not let her come back home.  She was with Emma just now but she couldn’t stay.  Fred was behaving very nastily and he might tell Emma any day that she, Madeline, had to go.  They were all against her.  Everything was against a girl anyway.  They never had a chance as a man did.  She wished she had been killed when she had been thrown out of the car that night.  It would have been much better for her than being as miserable as she was now.  She often wished she was dead.  But what she had written to Ted Holiday for was because she thought perhaps he could help her to find a job in the college town.  She had to earn some money right away.  She would do anything.  She didn’t care what and would be very grateful to Ted if he would or could help her to find work.

That was all.  There was not a single personal note in the whole thing, no reference to their flirtation of the early summer except the one allusion to the accident, no attempt to revive such frail ties as had existed between them, no reproaches to Ted for having broken these off so summarily.  It was simply and exclusively a plea for help from one human being to another.

Ted thrust the letter soberly in his pocket and went off for a shower.  But the thing went with him.  He wished Madeline hadn’t written, wished she hadn’t besought his aid, wished most of all she hadn’t been such a devilish good sport in it all.  If she had whined, cast things up against him as she might have done, thrown herself in any way upon him, he could perhaps have ignored her and her plea.  But she had done nothing of the sort.  She was deucedly game now just as she had been the night of the smash.  And by a queer trick of his mind her very gameness made Ted Holiday feel more quiet and responsible, a frame of mind he heartily resented.  Hanged if he could see why it was his funeral!  If that old Hottentot of a grandfather of hers chose to turn her out without a cent it wasn’t his fault.  For that matter he wasn’t to blame for what Madeline herself had done.  He didn’t suppose the old man would have cut so rough without plenty of cause.  Why did she have to bob up now and make him feel so darned rotten?

Unfortunately, even the briefest of episodes have a way of not erasing themselves as conveniently as most of us would like to have them.  The thing was there and Ted Holiday had to look at it whether it made him feel “darned rotten” or not.  He did not want to help the girl, did not even want to renew their acquaintance by even so much as a letter.  The whole thing was an infernal nuisance.  But infernal nuisance or not, he had to deal with it, could not funk it.  He was a Holiday and no Holiday ever shirked obligations he himself had incurred.  He was a Holiday and no Holiday ever let a woman ask for help, and not give It.  By the time he was back from the shower Ted knew precisely where he stood.  Perhaps he had known all along.