e tasks of Hercules, Joan
of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.

In her room she got the granite-ware stew-pan out of the 2x4-foot
china--er--I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a
rat's-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions. She came out
with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed.

There was neither a potato nor an onion. Now, what kind of a beef-stew
can you make out of simply beef? You can make oyster-soup without
oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without coffee, but
you can't make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.

But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door
look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf. With salt
and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a
little cold water) 'twill serve--'tis not so deep as a lobster a la
Newburg nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but 'twill serve.

Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall. According
to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running water to be
found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it only ambled
or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no place here.
There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often met to dump
their coffee grounds and glare at one another's kimonos.

At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair
and plaintive eyes, washing two large "Irish" potatoes. Hetty knew the
Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning "double hextra-magnifying
eyes" could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopedia,
her "Who's What?" her clearinghouse of news, of goers and comers. From
a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had learned that the
girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living in a kind of
attic--or "studio," as they prefer to call it--on the top floor. Hetty
was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it certainly
wasn't a house; because house-painters, although they wear splashy
overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to
indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.

The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as
an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a
dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel
one of the potatoes with it.

Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who
intends to be ch