pretense
at gentility. The woman who faced her now--hard-featured, with narrow,
suspicious eyes and a mass of florid hair--was unmistakably and brutally
vulgar.

"What's the good of your keeping on saying you hope to get an engagement
next week?" she demanded, with a sneer. "Who's likely to engage you?
Why, you've lost your color and your looks and your weight since you
came to stay here. They don't want such as you in the chorus. And for
the rest, you're too high and mighty, that's my opinion of you. Take
what you can get, and how you can get it, and be thankful,--that's my
motto. Day after day you tramp about the streets with your head in the
air, and won't take this and won't take that, and meanwhile my bill gets
bigger and bigger. Now where have you been to this morning, I should
like to know?"

Beatrice, who was faint and tired, shaking in every limb, tried to pass
out of the room, but her questioner barred the way.

"I have been up town," she answered, nervously.

"Hear of anything?"

Beatrice shook her head.

"Not yet. Please let me go upstairs and lie down. I am tired and I need
to rest."

"And I need my money," Mrs. Selina P. Watkins declared, without quitting
her position, "and it's no good your going up to your room because the
door's locked."

"What do you mean?" Beatrice faltered.

"I mean that I've done with you," the lodging-house keeper announced.
"Your room's locked up and the key's in my pocket, and the sooner you
get out of this, the better I shall be pleased."

"But my box--my clothes," Beatrice cried.

"I'll keep 'em a week for you," the woman answered. "Bring me the
money by then and you shall have them. If I don't hear anything of you,
they'll go to the auction mart."

Something of her old spirit fired the girl for a moment. She was angry,
and she forgot that her knees were trembling with fatigue, that she was
weak and aching with hunger.

"How dare you talk like that!" she exclaimed. "You shall have your money
shortly, but I must have my clothes. I cannot go anywhere without them."

The woman laughed harshly.

"Look here, my young lady," she said, "you'll see your box again when
I see the color of your money, and not before. And now out you go,
please,--out you go! If you're going to make any trouble, Solly will
have to show you the way down the steps."

The woman had opened the door, and a colored servant, half dressed, with
a broom in her hand, came slouching down the pass