"There," she said, "that's something that will make you worse."

"Where?" asked the girl, as she caught up the paper.

"Front page, big headlines. You can't miss it."

The girl stepped to the window and pushed aside the heavy curtain. In the
morning light she was revealed there petite and charming, despite
penciled eyebrows and carmined lips. Her figure was daintily
proportioned. There was grace in every line. Her deep brown eyes glowed
as she read the words Mary Randall had written.

When she finished reading the girl crumpled the paper in her hand and
filled another glass. She lifted the wine slowly.

"Here's to you, Mary Randall," she said.

"That's a rotten toast," said the madame.

"Is it?" replied the girl. "Well, let me tell you something. I'd like to
go straight out of this house and find Mary Randall and say to her: 'I'm
with you, Mary Randall, and I hope to God you win out.'"

"You don't think of me," whined the older woman. "Look what a knock that
reform stuff gives business."

"You!" Nellie's temper flared into a flame. "Say, you ought to be in
jail! Now don't start anything you can't finish--" The older woman had
got to her feet menacingly. "You don't deserve no pity. You got into
this"--she indicated the gaudily furnished house by a gesture, "with your
eyes wide open. You picked out this business for yourself. But with me
it's different." She leaned across the table defiantly. "Yes, how about
me? How about Lottie and Emma--and that poor kid that came here happy
because she thought she'd found a decent job? Did we pick out this
business? Did we? Not on your life. We walked into a trap and we can't
get out. Yes, and there's thousands like us all over this country." She
snatched up the bottle and poured more wine. "I'm for you, Mary Randall,"
she said, raising the glass to the sunlight. "More power to your elbow!"

* * * * *

Mary Randall read the newspapers in a garret room of a tall lodging
house. A pile of letters, in a peculiar shade of dark blue, sealed,
stamped and ready for the postoffice, lay in a heap before her. She went
through each newspaper carefully, noting the display and studying the
"features" of her story that had impressed the newspaper men. At last she
laid them down.

"Well, Anna," she said, smiling, addressing her maid. "We've made a good
beginning. The town, you see, is interested in us."

Anna's ordinarily impassive face smil