"Keep your hair on, Buddy. I work there, and I heard about that pinch.
Swell young married lady. Say," she added, after a thoughtful pause:
"has she got somethin' comin'?"

"Something coming? How? What?"

"Don't be dumb. A kid."

He stared. She was looking at him with unabashed frankness. Those who
live in the close, rough intimacy of the slums do not cherish false
shame about the major facts of life.

"Suppose she has?" queried the youth sulkily.

"Why, that'll be all right, you poor boob," returned the kindly Mayme.
"The judge'll let her off with a warning."

"How do you know?"

"They always do. Those cases are common. Dolan ought to be canned for
makin' a pinch of a lady in the fam'ly way."

"What if they do let her off?" lamented the youth. "It'll be in all the
papers and I'll be ruined. My life's spoiled. I might as well leave
the city."

"Ah, don't do a mean trick like that to the old town!" besought the
sardonic Mayme. "Where do you come in to get hurt?"

He burst into the hectic grievances of the pampered and spoiled child.
His family was just getting a foothold in Society (with an almost holy
emphasis on the word) and now they were disgraced. All was up. Their
new, precariously held acquaintances would drop them. In his petulant
grief he did an amazing thing; he produced a bunch of clippings from the
local society columns, setting forth, in the printed company of the
Shining Ones, the doings (mostly charitable) of Mrs. Samuel Berthelin,
her daughter, Mrs. Harris, and her son, David, referred to glowingly as
"the scion of the wealth and position of the late lamented financier."

Mayme was impressed. Like most shop-girls she was a fervent reader of
society news. (If shop-girls did not read this fine flower of American
democracy, nobody would, except those who wait eagerly and anxiously for
their names to appear.) She perceived--not knowing that the advertising
leverage of the Berthelin Loan Agency had forced those insecure portals
of print for the entry of Mrs. Berthelin and her progeny--that she was
in the presence of the Great. Capacity for awe was not in Mayme's
independent soul. But she was interested and sympathetic. Here was a
career worth saving!

"Let's go over to the station-house," said she. "I know some of the
cops."

To the white building with the green lanterns they went. The shoplifting
case, it appeared, had already been bailed out. Furthermore, everything
would be all right and