hat you bought me off. Not
me! Us girls has got to be careful. Besides, I'm looking for a battle
with the real champ."

It can't be done? Oh, they did it.

The night that Cecille Manners had hysterics and Felicity was hurrying
because she knew that Fiegenspann would "bawl her out" if she was very
late, Perry Blair had been standing from eleven o'clock until a quarter
to twelve on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, too proud
to turn the collar of his light coat up against the winter cold, too
broke to buy a heavy one. He'd almost decided to hunt a job, anything
that would bring enough to take him back home. The Dream? Girl o'
Mine? It hurt his throat to think of these,--made him blink his eyes.

So they had undermined him.

He was standing on a corner wondering what it was all about. But in
that last three-quarters of an hour he had achieved something at least,
a terse sentence that must, it seems, epitomize the sentiments of every
idol who ever shared his predicament, every king who ever lacked a
throne.

He nodded his head over it, and voiced it pensively.

"It's a great world," he muttered, "if you don't weaken."

Then he saw that she would very likely be killed if someone didn't do
something about it besides shout. He weighed the chances, in an
infinitesimal fraction of a second, and decided they were such that any
good gambler could scarcely ignore. So he bunched his muscles and
sprang.

Felicity's taxi had met a traffic tie-up at Forty-seventh Street which
made further direct advance impossible. In obedience to her plain
request for haste the driver had tried it to the west, found that way
cut off, and so detoured to the east. When, however, he wriggled up to
Broadway on Forty-fourth Street he had met with no better luck.

Here was a din of horns, of racing motors, of harried traffic police.
But not much chance of progress. So Felicity paid him and stepped off
the running-board into the thick of it to have a try on foot at the
very moment when the nearest officer thought to have it cleared.

He raised an arm and roared, bull-voiced:

"Come on there, now!"

And promptly the drivers of the two cars which had been at the heart of
the snarl, like key logs in a jam, both heckled, both in the wrong and
filled with unsaid things, trod harshly upon their accelerators.
Wire-wheeled sedan and lemon-tinted limousine, up-town bound and
cross-town bound, they leaped simultaneously forwa