ture.

Jeffrey had seated himself on the rail, his hands, too, resting on it,
and he regarded her with a queer terrified amusement, as if, in
research, he had dug up a strange object he had no use for and might
find it difficult to place. Not to name: he could name her very
accurately.

"So quick after I got here," he replied, with candour. "I tell you
plainly, Madame Beattie, there isn't a cent to be got out of me. I'm
done, broke, down and out."

Madame Beattie regarded him with an unimpaired good-humour.

"Bless you, Jeff," said she, "I know that. What are you going to do, now
you're out?"

The question came as hard as a stroke after the cushioned assurance
preceding it. Jeff met it as he might have met such a query from a man
to whom he owed no veilings of hard facts.

"I don't know," said he. "If I did know I shouldn't tell you."

Madame Beattie seemed not to suspect the possibility of rebuff.

"Esther hasn't changed a particle," said she.

Jeff scowled, not at her, but absently at the side of the house, and
made no answer.

"Aren't you coming down there?" asked Madame Beattie peremptorily, with
the air of drumming him up to some task that would have to be reckoned
with in the end. "Come, Jeff, why don't you answer? Aren't you coming
down?"

Jeffrey had ceased scowling. He had smoothed his brows out with his
hand, indeed, as if their tenseness hurt him.

"Look here," said he, "you ask a lot of questions."

She laughed again, a different sort of old laugh, a fat and throaty one.

"Did I ever tell you," said she, "what the Russian grand duke said when
I asked him why he didn't marry?"

"No," said Jeff, quite peaceably now. She was safer in the company of
remembered royalties.

Madame Beattie sought among the jingling decorations of her person for
a cigarette, found it and offered him another.

"Quite good," she told him. "An Italian count keeps me supplied. I don't
know where the creature gets them."

Then, after they had lighted up, she returned to her grand duke, and
Jeff found the story sufficiently funny and laughed at it, and she
pulled another out of her well-stored memory, and he laughed at that.
Madame Beattie told her stories excellently. She knew how little weight
they carry smothered in feminine graces and coy obliquities from the
point. Graces had long ceased to interest her as among the assets of a
life where man and woman have to work to feed themselves. Now she sat
down with her