last, you may walk home with me if
you like."

"What word do you refer to? Cutie?"

"Yes. And another still more offensive."

"Sweetie?"

"Yes. Disgusting! 'Kid's' bad enough. But I thought you mightn't know
any better. I draw the line at the others."

"All right," said Ursus rather sulkily, sure that he was being made
fun of now. "But when a chap's a girl's friend what _is_ he to call
her?"

"'You' will do very well, if 'Miss Child' is beyond your vocabulary."

"I don't call that bein' friends. Say, is that your mutt's automobile
sort of following along in our wake?"

"I don't know, for I don't want to look back," said Win. (They were
out of the park by this time.) "But--I've changed my mind about
walking all the way. Let's hurry and take a Fifty-Ninth Street car!"

* * * * *

By day, in the shop, Win could laugh when she thought of the Columbus
Avenue house where she and Sadie "hung out." But at night, in her
room, trying desperately to sleep, she could not even smile. To do so,
with all those noises fraying the edges of her brain, would be to
gibber!

In that neighbourhood front rooms were cheaper than rooms at the back.
Lodgers who could afford to do so paid extra money for a little extra
tranquillity. Neither Sadie Kirk nor Winifred Child was of these
aristocrats. Their landlady had thriftily hired two cheap flats in a
fair-sized house whose ground floor was occupied by a bakery, and
whose fire-escapes gave it the look of a big body wearing its skeleton
outside. She "rented" her rooms separately, and made money on the
transaction, though she could afford to take low prices.

In the street below the narrow windows surface cars whirred to and fro
and clanged their bells. In front of the windows, and strangely,
terribly near to the six-inch-wide balconies, furnished with withered
rubber plants, roared the "L" trains, jointed, many-eyed dragons
chasing each other so fast that there seemed to be no pause between at
any hour of the day or during most hours of the night. Private life
behind those windows was impossible unless you kept your blinds down.
If you forgot, or said wildly to yourself that you didn't care, that
you _must_ breathe and see your own complexion by daylight at any
cost, thousands of faces, one after the other, stared into yours. You
could almost touch them, and it was little or no consolation to
reflect when they had seen you brushing your hair or fasten