that only let you back twenty-nine-fifty cost
three hundred if it cost a cent, and nothing but a snag in the hem and
the lace in front as good as new. Gee, I could show this cheap bunch
around here how to dress if I had a month's advance in hand!"

"Get off the trunk, Ysobel, and sit here, will you? I want to get it
out. Say, if Cottie could see me with the black hat to match! My little
sister I was telling you about could--"

"Who you got to thank? Who gave you the right steer? Take it from me, if
I hadn't gone along with you, every store on Sixth Avenue would have
X-rayed the corner of your handkerchief for the thirty-eight dollars
tied up in it and body-snatched you for your own funeral. Even with me
along you had a lean like a bent pin for that made-on-Canal-Street,
thirty-two-fifty, red silk they hauled out of the morgue to show you. I
seen you edgin' for that Kokome model."

"Me and Cottie was always great ones for red. I ought to had the red
serge you made so much fun of dyed for mourning, but Cottie--"

"Red! When you, in a tight-lookin' black that hugs you like it was wet,
and a black hat with a tilt that Anna Held would buy right off your
head, can walk into any office in the row this morning and land in the
show-girl row of any chorus on the bills. If you think that's an easy
stunt, ask any girl in this house."

"I--I ain't scared a bit now, since I'm going around with you, Ysobel:
but gee, if I had to go alone!"

"Fallows does the same thing for all of them. When I was in last spring
from first pony in a Middle West company of the 'Merry Whirl'--remind
me, and I'll show you my notices--when I was in last spring Fallows
dumped a little doll-eyed soubrette on me that didn't do a thing, after
I dragged her around to the offices, but grab a part away from me in a
Snooky Ookums quartet that Jim Simmons was puttin' out."

"Honest?"

"Sure! A production I'd been holding off for all season. Me that's made
the boards of more stages creak than she's ever seen!"

"Mrs. Fallows says you're just the one to show me around, that you are
one swell little pony, and an old one in the offices."

"An old one in the offices! I don't see Fallows herself suffering from
no growing-pains. They don't come any farther gone to seed than her. She
tried to stick to her soft-shoe act till the office boys of the
Consolidated Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Managers got
up a subscription and bought her this four-flig