an't get along with my people. They always want me to do
what they want. Do you live here?"

"Yes," said Carrie.

"With your family?"

Carrie was ashamed to say that she was married. She had talked so much
about getting more salary and confessed to so much anxiety about her
future, that now, when the direct question of fact was waiting, she
could not tell this girl.

"With some relatives," she answered.

Miss Osborne took it for granted that, like herself, Carrie's time was
her own. She invariably asked her to stay, proposing little outings
and other things of that sort until Carrie began neglecting her dinner
hours. Hurstwood noticed it, but felt in no position to quarrel with
her. Several times she came so late as scarcely to have an hour in which
to patch up a meal and start for the theatre.

"Do you rehearse in the afternoons?" Hurstwood once asked, concealing
almost completely the cynical protest and regret which prompted it.

"No; I was looking around for another place," said Carrie.

As a matter of fact she was, but only in such a way as furnished the
least straw of an excuse. Miss Osborne and she had gone to the office
of the manager who was to produce the new opera at the Broadway and
returned straight to the former's room, where they had been since three
o'clock.

Carrie felt this question to be an infringement on her liberty. She did
not take into account how much liberty she was securing. Only the latest
step, the newest freedom, must not be questioned.

Hurstwood saw it all clearly enough. He was shrewd after his kind, and
yet there was enough decency in the man to stop him from making any
effectual protest. In his almost inexplicable apathy he was content
to droop supinely while Carrie drifted out of his life, just as he was
willing supinely to see opportunity pass beyond his control. He could
not help clinging and protesting in a mild, irritating, and ineffectual
way, however--a way that simply widened the breach by slow degrees.

A further enlargement of this chasm between them came when the manager,
looking between the wings upon the brightly lighted stage where the
chorus was going through some of its glittering evolutions, said to the
master of the ballet:

"Who is that fourth girl there on the right--the one coming round at the
end now?"

"Oh," said the ballet-master, "that's Miss Madenda."

"She's good looking. Why don't you let her head that line?"

"I will," said the man.

"Ju