stingy little rascal! Won't give a poor lonesome fellow an
evening's pleasure, eh! The theatre? Want to go slumming?"

He was feeling his way now, a trifle puzzled. Usually he landed a buyer
at the first shot. Of course you had to use tact and discrimination.
Some you took to supper and to the naughty _revues_.

Occasionally you found a highbrow one who preferred the opera. Had he
not sat through Parsifal the week before? And nearly died! Some wanted
to begin at Tod Sloan's bar and work their way up through Montmartre,
ending with breakfast at the Pre Catalan. Those were the greedy ones.
But this one!

"What's she stalling for--with that face?" he asked himself.

Sophy Gold was moving toward the lift, the twinkling-eyed Miss Morrissey
with her.

"I'm working too hard to play. Thanks, just the same. Good-night."

Max Tack, his face blank, stood staring up at them as the lift began to
ascend.

"_Trazyem_," said Miss Morrissey grandly to the lift man.

"Third," replied that linguistic person, unimpressed.

It turned out to be soothingly quiet and cool in Ella Morrissey's room.
She flicked on the light and turned an admiring glance on Sophy Gold.

"Is that your usual method?"

"I haven't any method," Miss Gold seated herself by the window. "But
I've worked too hard for this job of mine to risk it by putting myself
under obligations to any New York firm. It simply means that you've got
to buy their goods. It isn't fair to your firm."

Miss Morrissey was busy with hooks and eyes and strings. Her utterance
was jerky but concise. At one stage of her disrobing she breathed a
great sigh of relief as she flung a heavy garment from her.

"There! That's comfort! Nights like this I wish I had that back porch of
our flat to sit on for just an hour. Ma has flower boxes all round it,
and I bought one of those hammock couches last year. When I come home
from the store summer evenings I peel and get into my old blue-and-white
kimono and lie there, listening to the girl stirring the iced tea for
supper, and knowing that Ma has a platter of her swell cold fish with
egg sauce!" She relaxed into an armchair. "Tell me, do you always talk
to men that way?"

Sophy Gold was still staring out the open window.

"They don't bother me much, as a rule."

"Max Tack isn't a bad boy. He never wastes much time on me. I don't buy
his line. Max is all business. Of course he's something of a smarty, and
he does think he's the first verse a