't, you go on and leave me. Say, what do you take me for? Do you
think I 'd throw down a friend because somebody else talked about him?
Well, you don't know Hat Sterling. When Minty told me that story, she
was back in my dressing-room, and I sent her out o' there a-flying, and
with a tongue-lashing that she won't forget for a month o' Sundays."

"I reckon that was the reason she jumped on me so hard at the club." He
chuckled. He had taken heart again. All that Sadness had said was true,
after all, and people thought no less of him. His joy was unbounded.

"So she jumped on you hard, did she? The cat!"

"Oh, she did n't say a thing to me."

"Well, Joe, it 's just like this. I ain't an angel, you know that, but I
do try to be square, and whenever I find a friend of mine down on his
luck, in his pocket-book or his feelings, why, I give him my flipper.
Why, old chap, I believe I like you better for the stiff upper lip you
've been keeping under all this."

"Why, Hattie," he broke out, unable any longer to control himself, "you
're--you 're----"

"Oh, I 'm just plain Hat Sterling, who won't throw down her friends. Now
come on and get something to eat. If that thing is at the club, we 'll
go there and show her just how much her talk amounted to. She thinks she
's the whole game, but I can spot her and then show her that she ain't
one, two, three."

When they reached the Banner, they found Minty still there. She tried on
the two the same tactics that she had employed so successfully upon Joe
alone. She nudged her companion and tittered. But she had another
person to deal with. Hattie Sterling stared at her coldly and
indifferently, and passed on by her to a seat. Joe proceeded to order
supper and other things in the nonchalant way that the woman had
enjoined upon him. Minty began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, but it
was her business not to be beaten. She laughed outright. Hattie did not
seem to hear her. She was beckoning Sadness to her side. He came and sat
down.

"Now look here," she said, "you can't have any supper because you have
n't reached the stage of magnificent hunger to make a meal palatable to
you. You 've got so used to being nearly starved that a meal don't taste
good to you under any other circumstances. You 're in on the drinks,
though. Your thirst is always available.--Jack," she called down the
long room to the bartender, "make it three.--Lean over here, I want to
talk to you. See that woman over