risms and pilgrims" forty times the devil will flee from
you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher tones she felt
the thrill of _noblesse oblige_ to her very bones.

There was another source of learning in the great departmental
school. Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch
and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently
frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the
purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting
may lack the dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it
has all the importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first
daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his
proper place in the household. It is Woman's Conference for Common
Defense and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse
upon and against the World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience
who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most
helpless of the young of any animal--with the fawn's grace but
without its fleetness; with the bird's beauty but without its power
of flight; with the honey-bee's burden of sweetness but without
its--Oh, let's drop that simile--some of us may have been stung.

During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and
exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the
tactics of life.

"I says to 'im," says Sadie, "ain't you the fresh thing! Who do you
suppose I am, to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you
think he says back to me?"

The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow bob together; the
answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be
used by each thereafter in passages-at-arms with the common enemy,
man.

Thus Nancy learned the art of defense; and to women successful
defense means victory.

The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other
college could have fitted her as well for her life's ambition--the
drawing of a matrimonial prize.

Her station in the store was a favored one. The music room was near
enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the
best composers--at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for
appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying
to set a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating
influence of art wares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments
that are almost culture to women.

The other