Good old Tootles.
Even a man's room can be made to look like something when a girl takes
an interest in it."

If she had been a dog she would have wagged her tail and crinkled up
her nose and jumped up to put her nozzle against his hand. As it was
she flushed with pleasure and gave a little laugh. She was a
thousandfold repaid for all her pains. But, during the first half of a
meal made riotous by the invincible Howard and the animated Irene,
Tootles sat very quiet and thoughtful and even a little awed. How could
Martin have sensed the fact that she had been there?... Could
she,--could she possibly, even with the ever-ready help of
nature,--hope to win against such a handicap? She would see. She would
see. It was her last card. But during all the rest of the meal she saw
the picture of a muscular sun-tanned youth carrying that pretty
unconscious thing down the incline to a car, and, all against her will,
she was sorry. That girl, pampered as she was, outside the big ring of
hard daily effort and sordid struggle as she always had had the luck to
be, loved, too. Gee, it was a queer world.

The stoop called them when they left the boxlike dining room. It was
still hot and airless. But the mosquitoes were out with voracious
appetite and discretion held them to the living room.

Irene flung herself on the bumpy sofa with a cigarette between her lips
and a box near to her elbow. "This's the life," she said. "I shall
never be able to go back to lil' old Broadway and grease paint and a
dog kennel in Chorusland."

"Sufficient for the day," said Howard, loosening his belt. "If a
miracle man blew in here right now with a million dollars in each hand
and said: 'Howard Guthrie Oldershaw,'--he'd be sure to know about the
Guthrie,--'this is all yours if you'll come to the city,' I'd..."

Irene leaned forward with her mouth open and her round eyes as big as
headlights. "Well?"

"Take it and come right back."

"You disappoint me, Funny-face. Go to the piano and hit the notes.
That's all you're fit for."

It was a baby grand, much out of tune, but Howard, bulging over the
stool, made it sound like an orchestra,--a cabaret orchestra, and ran
from Grieg to Jerome Kern and back to Gounod, syncopating everything
with the gusto and the sense of time that is almost peculiar to a
colored professional. Then he suddenly burst into song and sang about a
baby in the soft round high baritone of all men who run to fat and with
the same qui