nt shopgirls in good frocks. I like your
Seattle. It's a glorious city. And I love so many of the fine, simple,
real people I've met here. I admire your progress. I do know how
miraculously you've changed it from a mining camp. But for heaven's sake
don't forget the good common hardiness of the miners. Somehow, London
social distinctions seem ludicrous in American cities that twenty years
ago didn't have much but board sidewalks and saloons. I don't care
whether it's Seattle or Minneapolis or Omaha or Denver, I refuse to
worry about the Duchess of Corey and the Baroness Betz and all the other
wonderful imitations of gilt. When a pair of finishing-school flappers
like Betz and Corey try to impress me with their superiority to workmen,
and their extreme aristocracy and Easternness, they make me tired. I
_am_ the East!"

She had made peace with the Gilsons by night; she had been reasonably
repentant about not playing the game of her hosts; but inside her eager
heart she snuggled a warm thought. She remembered how gaily she had once
promised, out on the road, to come to Milt's room and cook for him. She
thought of it with homesick desire. His room probably wasn't
particularly decorative, and she doubted his having an electric range,
but it would be fun to fry eggs again, to see him fumbling with the
dish-washing, to chatter and plan golden futures, and not worry about
the opinions of Mrs. Corey and Mrs. Betz.

The next afternoon the limousine was not busy and she borrowed it, with
the handsome Greek chauffeur.

She gave him an address not far from the university.

He complained, "Pardon me, miss, but I think you have the wrong number.
That block is a low quarter."

"Probably! But that's the right number!"

He raised his Athenian eyebrows, and she realized what a mistake she had
made in not bringing the lethal tea-strainer along. When they had
stopped in front of a cheap candy-store, he opened the door of the car
with such frigid reserve that she thought seriously about slapping him.

She climbed the stingy, flapping stairs, and knocked at the first door
in the upper hall. It was opened by a large apron, to which a sleepy
woman was an unimportant attachment, and out of the mass of apron and
woman came a yawning, "Mr. Daggett's room is down the hall on the
right."

Claire knocked at a door which had at various epochs been blue, yellow,
and pink, and now was all three. No answer. She tried the knob, went in.

She co