diagnosed shrewdly. "I'll bet two
bits you've been eating napoleons again."

"I have got indigestion, but it's thanks only to being fed up
with existence--the kind we lead, at least. I want something better."

"The vote, perhaps?"

"For two cents I'd throw something at you."

The artist uncoiled her legs, stuck the pen in her hair, set the
ink-bottle down on the floor, sighed, and, lifting the drawing-board,
held it at arm's length, studying her work through narrowed eyelids.

"Then it must be a man," she concluded absently. "When a woman of
twenty-seven wants something and doesn't know what it is, it's either
the vote or a man."

"Oh, shut up."

"With man an odds-on favourite in the betting." Miss Spode laid the
board aside with a "Thank goodness, that's finished!" and, rising,
stretched her cramped limbs. "What I'd like to know," she persisted,
"is whether it's man abstract or a man concrete."

Sally laughed bitterly. "Take a good look at me, dear--as an exhibit,
not as a friend--and tell me honestly whether any man worth having
would glance twice at me."

"You can be pretty enough," Miss Spade returned seriously, "when you
want to take the trouble--"

"But I don't--ever."

"The more fool you."

"What's the use--on seven a week? What's the good of being pretty in
rags like these? It only gets a girl in wrong. I don't care how
fetching I might make myself seem--"

"But you ought to."

"Look here; do you know how a reporter would describe me?"

"Of course; 'respectable working girl.'"

"Well, then, men worth while don't run after 'respectable working
girls'; they leave that to things who wear 'Modish Men's
Clothing'--with braided cuffs and pockets slashed on the bias!--and
stand smirking on corners we have to pass going home. Do you think I'd
do my hair becomingly, and--and all that--to attract such creatures?"

"So it's abstract man. Thought so!"

"It's starvation, that's what it is. I'm sick for want of what other
girls get without asking--pretty clothes and--and all that sort of
thing."

"Meaning," the artist interpreted gravely, "love."

"Well," Sally demanded, defiant, "why not?"

"Why not indeed?" Lucy returned obliquely, wandering round the studio
and collecting various articles of wearing-apparel toward her
appearance in public.

"I'm twenty-seven," Miss Manvers declared mutinously. "I'll never be
younger--I want to be loved before I'm old!"

She paused, viewed with reassuring am