vantage at the Pelican table Miss Thornton viewed them anxiously. "The Penguins seem depressed," she said. "Is anything the matter?"

"I guess it's their Social Conscience," Prissy Adams said grimly, "getting the better of them."

After taps Clara VanSittart laid a packet on Emma's cot. She had no business to be talking at all. And it was almost another speech.

"We feel," she concluded, "that Prissy didn't understand."

In tense silence Emma undid the parcel. It contained her legitimate winnings. She didn't want their darned old beads, but she wrapped the things up again and slipped them under her pillow. "O.K.," she said.

The Penguins crept into their beds. They had made a noble gesture. They had cleared their consciences. But for some reason or other they slept badly.

* * * * *

The Penguins followed each other on the springboard in rapid succession. They performed every dive they knew and some they didn't, with an almost desperate fervor. And after each feat they turned anxious faces to the small figure in the cheap black bathing suit perched on the landing stage, its face between its fists, like a Gothic imp peering down malevolently on the world from a cathedral buttress. But in fact Pip-Emma wasn't even looking at them. She was worrying about Pop and Ma and the Gang.

Prissy Adams climbed out of the water and stood beside her. "Don't you want to go in, too, Emma?" she said. "Don't you want to learn to swim?"

"Nope," Pip-Emma said. "It's cold, and I'm scared."

"Of course you're not," Prissy said. "Happy Warriors are never scared," she said with a brightness that she hoped wouldn't become a habit.

"I ain't a Happy Warrior," Emma said. "And I'm scared."

"But supposing someone were drowning, wouldn't you want to be able to save them?"

"We don't drown down our way," Pip-Emma retorted bleakly. "We ain't got no water."

It was almost as pathetic as the absence of trees. And, as a statement, much more accurate. Except on hot summer nights when good-natured street cleaners turned their hoses on the ecstatically squealing Gang, there was no water. Pip-Emma, remembering those glorious occasions, hunched herself dismally, and the defeated Prissy strode on her way. At the same moment Janet bobbed up from among the woodpiles.

"Gee, that was swell of you, Emma!"

Pip-Emma peered down. "What was?"

"Saying you were scared. I'm always scared. But I'd be too scared to tell anyone."

Pip-Emma stretched out a skinny arm and pulled Janet up beside her.
"What you scared of?"

"'Most everything."

"Why?"

Janet sighed. "It's something wrong with me. The doctors say it's—it's a complex. An in—inferiority complex."

"What's that?"

"It's a thing you get, like measles."

Pip-Emma looked at Janet dubiously. "I don't see no spots."

"You don't have spots. You just feel mean. You want dreadfully to do things. But you know you can't. So you don't."

"What things?"

"Well, like the swimming race next Saturday. Mummy and Dad are coming up for it. Prissy says I could win the Penguin Trophy if I didn't have my complex. But Clara knows she's going to win. So she will. She hasn't got any complex. She just overeats."

They sat side by side in melancholy silence. But Pip-Emma's misplaced toothache was easing off. Janet might not be the Gang. But she belonged to Emma. Ever since Emma had said she wasn't a dumb cluck she'd followed Emma round like a little lost dog that had been found. If anyone belonged to you like that, you had to look out for them.

"I wish my Pop and Ma were coming up," Pip-Emma said suddenly.

"Why? Are you homesick, too, Emma?"

"I dunno. I want Pop and Ma."

"It's no good wanting, is it?"

"Well, you've got yours, haven't you?"

"Not really. Not together. I mean—they don't live together."

"Why not?"

"They don't have to. Dad's got a place in Florida and Long Island and Maine and New York. So when they quarrel, they just go off. Different places. And I can't be with either of them because the other won't let me," Janet choked. "I guess they'll quarrel Saturday," she said.

"Gee, that's tough." Pip-Emma gave a small hoarse chuckle. "Pop and Ma get mad sometimes. But Ma says, 'You old son-of-a-gun, I guess I gotter live with you and like it.' And Pop says, 'I like it fine, you old so-and-so.' And he takes us out and gives us a sundae at the drugstore. Ma says you can't stay mad in two rooms."

"I wish we lived in two rooms," Janet said.

Pip-Emma knitted her black brows. "Maybe," she said, "you might tell 'em so."

"I'd be too scared."

But Pip-Emma was after her thought like a terrier after an elusive rabbit. "If my Pop and Ma were here, I'd jump into their darned old water. I wouldn't care how cold it was. I wouldn't be scared. Maybe if your Pop and Ma are along, you'll win the race, and then you'll never be scared again."

"But I shan't win it. I'll lose my breath like I always do. And
Clara's so fat. She just has to float."

"Maybe if she was sick—if she eats something—"

"She can't. Prissy's got her on a diet. She's Prissy's pet."

Pip-Emma put her arm over Janet's shoulder. It was an accolade, and
Janet knew it.

"Gee—you poor kid!" Pip-Emma said, and relapsed into deep thought again.

The two wandered off the landing stage together. Outside the gameroom Claudine was writing up a notice on the blackboard. The twins went to a progressive school where you learned spelling only if you felt the urge. The twins had never felt it.

"You don't spell Saturday with an 'a' in the middle," Pip-Emma said.

A hot and flustered twin rubbed out the word with a lofty air of apprehended carelessness, and Pip-Emma wrote it in for her.

"If I spelled like you do," she said, "old Perks would give me hell."

* * * * *

The harassed Penguins pinned one of their last hopes on horses. It seemed probable that if Pip-Emma had never seen any trees, she had never seen horses, either—or only from a distance—and that she would be impressed. But it turned out that Pip-Emma's uncle had a horse—not the W.P.A. uncle but the mounted-cop uncle—and that it was a bigger and better horse than anything in the Camp stables. Pip-Emma had actually ridden it from Ninth to Tenth Avenue. Moreover her uncle had chased Squint-Eyed Peters down Forty-fifth Street and shot him and his armored car so full of holes that it was hardly worth while cleaning them up. Pip-Emma told the story after taps and in such gory detail that the Penguins didn't know or care that discipline was going to the dogs.

They learned at the same time that Mr. Binns, in his unregenerate youth, had been an Englishman and had fought in the Great War and that Emma's name was Pip because in English soldier language Pip-Emma meant anything that happened after midday. And Emma had happened in Hell's Kitchen at 3:30.

The Penguins sat up in their beds and listened spellbound. The glamour surrounding Wall Street, Big Business, and the kind but stoutish and baldish gentlemen who were their fathers was suffering an acute depression. The prospect of their fathers' appearance on Saturday and of Pip-Emma's