ar at hand was a group of very prosperous-looking spirits
arraigned for judgment.

"Do you belong with that bunch?" the policeman asked.

"Who are they?" was my answer.

"Why," said he, "they are--"

But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should
occupy.

Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or stuffed
peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they keep in
department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six dollars per
week. The remainder was credited to her and debited to somebody else's
account in the ledger kept by G---- Oh, primal energy, you say, Reverend
Doctor--Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy.

During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per
week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount.
Don't care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts.
Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six
dollars per week.

One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within an
eighth of an inch of her _medulla oblongata_, she said to her chum,
Sadie--the girl that waits on you with her left side:

"Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy."

"You never did!" exclaimed Sadie admiringly. "Well, ain't you the lucky
one? Piggy's an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places.
He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have
swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You'll have a swell time,
Dulce."

Dulcie hurried homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed
the delicate pink of life's--real life's--approaching dawn. It was
Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week's wages.

The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The
electric lights of Broadway were glowing--calling moths from miles, from
leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and
attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like
those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors' homes, turned
and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. Manhattan,
the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white,
heavy-odoured petals.

Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation
lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been spent
otherwise--fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten ce