n up the _carte du jour_ until finally I triumph in the
introduction of real food, so that when you ask for tea in this house
you will get a full portion of porterhouse steak and French fried
potatoes. But don't think me hypercritical, Isabel," he added. "Even
now I can usually manage to part from you without reeling, faint with
hunger, down your front steps and collapsing at their feet--I should
say foot."

"I'm extremely relieved to hear you say so," replied the girl.

The third young man, who alone of the three wore a frock coat, and who
retained on his hand his left glove while his right was laid smoothly
across his knee, now entered the conversation.

"You talk as though you were really hungry, Charlie," he said.

"Well, I am, rather," the other rejoined. "And I can tell you, Stan,
that if you lived in my boarding house, you never could have completed
that charming still-life effect of the platter of fish that I recently
saw in your studio. You would have eaten your model before you could
have finished the picture."

"Why don't you change your boarding house, Charlie, if it's so bad?"
Miss Hurd inquired.

"I did," her cousin replied. "Of boarding houses within my sadly
circumscribed means there is a very wide but strictly numerical choice.
They are all exactly alike, you understand. I changed once, twice,
twenty, forty times. I grew positively dizzy caroming from one
inferior boarding house to another. You would have thought I was
trying a peripatetic preventative for dyspepsia. Finally the mental
strain of remembering where to go home at night became so irksome that
I decided to leave bad enough alone and stay where I was--one eleven
Mount Vernon Place--at the sign of the three aces. It's no worse, you
see, than anywhere else--it's merely a matter of living down to my
painfully limited income. But," he added thoughtfully, "I sincerely
wish some philanthropist would put me to the trouble of moving again."

The two men laughed at Wilkinson's frank exposition, but his cousin
frowned a little.

"I wish father would do something for you," she said. "There are so
many things he could do if he chose."

"He was good enough to offer me a job as conductor on one of his street
cars, the last time I mentioned the subject," the other responded
cheerfully. "But I told him that the company's system of espionage was
reputed to be so nearly perfect that I doubted whether I could make the
position pay--that