bear it,
because she only liked listening to herself. Jay sat modestly in a corner
and listened, like the other representatives of her generation.

The Chap from the Top Floor was an Older and Wiser Man. His wife could
not live with him, but he was very kind and fatherly to every one else,
and Jay was rather fond of him. He was about fifty, and anything but
beautiful. Also the C.O.S. would not have admired him. But I believe he
did a good deal of thinking inside that bristly head of his.

"Ow my dear," said Mrs. 'Ero Edwards, laying a fat hand on Jay's knee.
"We're all so 'appy. Dusty's wrote to siy 'e's got the sack from the Army
becos of 'is rheumatics. We're 'avin' a bit of a beano becos of it."

Everybody smiled at Jay, and her heart grew warmer. Some one handed her a
cup of tea sweetened with half an inch of sugar at the bottom of the
cup. The spoon had been plunged to its hilt in condensed milk. What
vulgar tastes she had!

"You can never mike a pal of a woman," said the Chap from the Top Floor,
continuing an argument for the benefit of an audience of women. "One
feller an' another--well--a pal's a pal. But women are all either wives
or--, there ain't no manner of palliness in them."

"'Tain't gentlemanly to talk so, Elbert," said Mrs. 'Ero Edwards. "Yore
mother was a woman, an' from 'er comes all you know, I'm thinkin', an'
all you are. Women is pals with women, an' men is pals with men. It's
only when men an' women gets assorted-like that palliness drops out."

"'Usbinds an' wives can be pals," said Mrs. Dusty. "Me an' Dusty useter
'ave a drop an' a jaw together every night for three months after we
married. Never 'ad a thought apart, we didn't."

"If I ars't Dusty," said the Top Floor Chap, "I don't know but what 'e
wouldn't tell a different tile."

"'Ere, 'bus-conductor, you can talk, an' you're a suffragette," said
Mrs. Dusty. "Ain't bein' a pal just as much a woman's job as a man's?"

"What is bein' a pal?" asked Mrs. Love bitterly. "'Avin' some one 'oo
drinks wiv you until she's sick, and then blacks your eye for you. There
ain't no pals, men or women."

"I think they're rare," said Jay. "Isn't being a pal just refusing to
admit a limit? Some people draw the line at a murderer, and some at a
suffragette, and some at a vegetarian, and some at a lady who wears the
same dress Sundays and week-days, but a real pal draws no line. Women and
dogs as well as men can be faithful beyond limit, I think, but