to tell you, Mag, listen!

You know where I was coming from yesterday when I passed Troyon's
window and grinned up at you, sitting there, framed in bottles of hair
tonic, with all that red wig of yours streaming about you?

Yep, from that little, rat-eyed lawyer's office. I was glum as mud. I
felt as though Tom and myself were both flies caught by the leg--he by
the law and I by the lawyer--in a sticky mess; and the more we flapped
our wings and struggled and pulled, the more we hurt and tore
ourselves, and the sooner we'd have to give it up.

Oh, that wizen-faced little lawyer that lives on the Tom Dorgans and
the Nance Oldens, who don't know which way to turn to get the money!
He looks at me out of his red little eyes and measures in dollars what
I'd do for Tom. And then he sets his price a notch higher than that.

When I passed the big department store, next to Troyon's, I was
thinking of this, and I turned in there, just aching for some of the
boodle that flaunts itself in a poor girl's face when she's desperate,
from every silk and satin rag, from every lace and jewel in the place.

The funny part of it is that I didn't want it for myself, but for Tom.
'Pon my soul, Mag, though I would have filled my arms with everything I
saw, I wouldn't have put on one thing of all the duds; just hiked off
to soak 'em and pay the lawyer. I might have been as old and ugly and
rich as the yellow-skinned woman opposite me, who was turning over
laces on the middle counter, for all these things meant to me--with Tom
in jail.

I was thinking this as I looked at her, when all at once I saw--

You know it takes a pretty quick touch, sharp eyes and good nerve to
get away with the goods in a big shop like that. Or it takes something
altogether different. It was the different way she did it. She took
up the piece of lace--it was a big collar, fine like a cobweb picture
in threads,--you can guess what it must have been worth if that old
sinner, Mother Douty, gave me fifteen dollars for it. She took it up
in a quick, eager way, as though she'd found just what she wanted.
Then she took out a lace sample from her gold-linked purse and held
them both up close to her blinky little eyes, looking at it through a
gold lorgnette with emeralds in the handle; pulling it and feeling it
with the air of one who knows a fine thing when she sees it, and just
what makes it fine. Then she rustled off to the door to examine it
closely in the