'You know your mother's not going to like it, don't you?' Greville commented. 'She'll give both you and Ralph hell!'

'Oh, heck, I never thought about my mother,' Yancie answered, feeling suddenly wretched. It was significant, she supposed, that Aunt Delia had not suggested she might make her home with her mother. The novelty of having a little girl, a white-haired child, had soon worn off. Yancie and her two cousins, who had been similar hindrances to the respective mothers, were, at the age of seven, sent off to boarding-school.

Yancie drove automatically as she recalled how her father had died in a skiing accident and how, although he had left her mother well provided for, it hadn't taken her mother long to run through his fortune. To find herself a job had simply never entered Ursula Dawkins' head. She had instead, after having affairs with several possibles, elected to marry money in the person of Ralph Proctor.

Yancie, on her holiday visits home, had learned to greatly care for Ralph Proctor, and he in turn had grown very fond of her. Too fond, anyhow, to consider allowing Yancie to live anywhere but in his home after the inevitable happened and his marriage broke down. Which was quite all right by Ursula Proctor, who walked off with a very handsome divorce settlement without the encumbrance of a too beautiful ash-blonde daughter to cramp her style.

That wouldn't stop her mother, Yancie fretted, from attempting to make her life, and Ralph's life, a misery should she learn that not only was her daughter no longer under Ralph Proctor's roof, but was actually working.

Although on that fateful day she had left her stepfather's home, Yancie had had no idea what work she could do. `The thing is, I'm not properly trained for anything in particular,' she explained to her aunt and half-cousin. `I can housekeep, I suppose, but…'