But Hester Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little, elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to blow my pitch pipe for a minor key.

Not that Hester’s isn’t one of the oldest stories in the world, too.  No matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks younger than love—­and how often the two are interchangeable!

If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two charges.

She was neither.  The most that can be said for her is that she was honestly what she was.

“If the wages of sin is death,” she said to a roadhouse party of roysterers one dawn, “then I’ve quite a bit of back pay coming to me.”  And joined in the shout that rose off the table.

I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed lines of her very, very old story.  Whose pasts so quickly mold and disintegrate as those of women of Hester’s stripe?  Their yesterdays are entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.

For the first seventeen years of her life she lived in what we might call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants.  Her particular one was in Ohio.  Demopolis, I think.  One of those change-engine-and-take-on-water stops with a stucco art-nouveau station, a roof drooping all round it, as if it needed to be shaved off like edges of a pie, and the name of the town writ in conch shells on a green slant of terrace.  You know—­the kind that first establishes a ten-o’clock curfew for its young, its dance halls and motion-picture theaters, and then sends in a hurry call for a social-service expert from one of the large Eastern cities to come and diagnose its malignant vice undergrowth.

Hester Bevins, of a mother who died bearing her and one of those disappearing fathers who can speed away after the accident without even stopping to pick up the child or leave a license number, was reared—­no, grew up, is better—­in the home of an aunt.  A blond aunt with many gold teeth and many pink and blue wrappers.

Whatever Hester knew of the kind of home that fostered her, it left apparently no welt across her sensibilities.  It was a rather poor house, an unpainted frame in a poor street, but there was never a lack of gayety or, for that matter, any pinching lack of funds.  It was an actual fact that, at thirteen, cotton or lisle stockings brought out a little irritated rash on Hester’s slim young legs, and she wore silk.  Abominations, it is true, at three pair for a dollar, that sprang runs and would not hold a darn, but, just the same, they were silk.  There was an air of easy camaraderie and easy money about that house.  It was not unusual for her to come home from school at high noon and find a front-room group of one, two, three, or four guests, almost invariably men.  Frequently these guests handed her out as much as half a dollar for candy money, and not another child in school reckoned in more than pennies.