Play the Game! | Page 4

up a football.
"Yes, look at her!" said her mother with feeling.
"Leave her alone, Mildred. Leave her alive!"
The two children were utterly absorbed. The boy was half a head taller
than the girl, heavier, sturdier, of a startling beauty. There was a
stubborn, much reviled wave in his bronze hair and his eyes were a
dark hazel flecked with black. His skin was bronze, too, bronzed by
many Catalina summer and winter swims at Ocean Park. It made his

teeth seem very white and flashing.
The window was open to the soft Southern California air, and the
voices came across to the watchers.
"Hold it!"
"I am holding it!"
A handsome man of forty came up the tree-shaded street, not quite
steadily, and turned into the King's walk. His hat was pulled low over
his eyes and the collar of his coat was turned up in spite of the mildness
of the day. He nodded to the boy and girl as he went past them and on
into the house.
"Again!" said Mrs. Lorimer, tragically. "That's the second time this
week!"
"Rough on the kid," said her husband. "See him now."
Jimsy King had turned his head and was following his father's slow
progress up the steps and across the porch and into the house. "Be in in
a minute, Dad!" he called after him.
"Loyal little beggar. I saw him steering him up Broadway one morning,
just at school time. Pluck."
Honor had looked after James King, the elder, too, and then at his son,
and then at the football in her hands again. "Hurry up," she commanded.
"Pull it tighter! Tighter! Do you call that pulling?" Inexorably she got
his attention back to the subject in hand.
"That makes it all the worse," said Mrs. Lorimer. "Of course they're
only children--babies, really--but I couldn't have anything.... It's bad
blood, Stephen. I couldn't have my child interested in one of the 'Wild
Kings'!"
"Well, you won't have, if you're wise. Let 'em alone. Let 'em lace
footballs on the front lawn ... and they won't hold hands on the side

porch! Why, woman dear, like the well-known Mr. Job, the thing you
greatly fear you'll bring to pass! Shut her up in a girls' school--even the
best and sanest--and you'll make boys suddenly into creatures of
romance, remote, desirable. Don't emphasize and underline for her.
She's as clean as a star and as unself-conscious as a puppy! Don't hurry
her into what one of those English play-writing chaps calls--Granville
Barker, isn't it?--Yes,--Madras House--'the barnyard drama of sex....
Male and female created He them ... but men and women are a long
time in the making!'"
The lacing of the football was finished. The boy lifted his head and
looked soberly at the door through which his father had entered, not
quite steadily. Then he drew a long breath, threw back his shining
bronze head, said something in a low tone to the girl, and ran into the
house.
Honor Carmody got to her feet and stood looking after him, the odd
mothering look in her square child's face. She stood so for long
moments, without moving, and her mother and her stepfather watched
her.
Suddenly Stephen Lorimer flung the window up as far as it would go
and leaned out.
"It's all right, Top Step," he called, meeting the leaping gladness of her
glance. "We've decided, your mother and I. You're going to L. A. High!
You're going----" but now he dropped his voice and spoke only for the
woman beside him, slipping a penitent and conciliatory arm about her,
his eyes impish, "you're going to run with the boys!"
CHAPTER II
The "Wild Kings" had lived in their fine old house ever since the
neighborhood could remember. The first and probably the wildest of
them had come out from Virginia when Los Angeles was still a
drowsing Spanish village, bringing with him an aged and excellent
cellar and a flock of negro servants. Honor's Carmody grandmother
could remember the picturesqueness of his entourage, of James King

himself, the hard-riding, hard-drinking, soft-spoken cavalier with his
proud, pale wife and his slim, high-stepping horses and his grinning
blacks. The general conviction was, Grandmother Carmody said, that
he had come--or been sent--west to make a fresh start. There was
something rather pathetically naïve about that theory. There could
never be a fresh start for the "Wild Kings" in a world of excellent
cellars and playing cards. In a surprisingly short time he had re-created
his earlier atmosphere for himself--an atmosphere of charm and cheer
and color ... and pride and shame and misery, in which his wife and
children lived and moved and had their being. In the early eighties he
built the big beautiful house on South Figueroa Street, moved the