really run a business with any sort of financial success, 'cause you
see a man never puts anything except his head into his business. And
of course if you only put your head into it, then you go right along
giving always just a little wee bit less than 'value received'--and so
you can't help, sir, making a profit. Why people would think you were
plain, stark crazy if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber
boots than they'd paid for. But a woman! Well, you see my little
business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy--perfectly good
sympathy, you know--but to sell it to people who really needed it,
instead of giving it away to people who didn't care anything about it
at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with
your heart--and you wouldn't feel decent at all, unless you delivered
to everybody just a little tiny bit more sympathy than he paid for.
Otherwise, you see you wouldn't be delivering perfectly good sympathy.
So that's why--you understand now--that's why I had to send you my
very own woolly blanket-wrapper, and my very own silver porringer, and
my very own sling-shot that I fight city cats with,--because, you see,
I had to use every single cent of your money right away to pay for the
things that I'd already bought for other people."

"For other people?" quizzed Stanton a bit resentfully.

"Oh, yes," acknowledged the girl; "for several other people." Then,
"Did you like the idea of the 'Rheumatic Nights Entertainment'?" she
asked quite abruptly.

"Did I like it?" cried Stanton. "Did I _like_ it?"

With a little shrugging air of apology the girl straightened up very
stiffly in her chair.

"Of course it wasn't exactly an original idea," she explained
contritely. "That is, I mean not original for you. You see, it's
really a little club of mine--a little subscription club of rheumatic
people who can't sleep; and I go every night in the week, an hour to
each one of them. There are only three, you know. There's a youngish
lady in Boston, and a very, very old gentleman out in Brookline, and
the tiniest sort of a poor little sick girl in Cambridge. Sometimes I
turn up just at supper-time and jolly them along a bit with their
gruels. Sometimes I don't get around till ten or eleven o'clock in the
great boo-black dark. From two to three in the morning seems to be the
cruelest, grayest, coldest time for the little girl in Cambridge....
And I play the banjo decently well, you know, and