hitting on twelve."

Fiegenspann understood. He nodded his heavy head. He began to see,
then and there, that Felicity Brown was going to add another page to
the Roof Club's history. He even essayed a compliment.

"My clientele is of all the world," he said. "And you--you look
expensif."

"I am," said Felicity. "No pikers need apply."

And with that business conference between Felicity and Fiegenspann
began the revelation which during the months that followed Cecille
watched in a kind of stricken suspense that must, it seems, have been
childish anticipation in the beginning of the pitiless blast which
would complete the other's sure destruction.

Since the day when freakish chance had thrown them together she had had
no illusions concerning Felicity's ultimate destiny. It had surprised
her not that Felicity was traveling the road, but that she had not long
since arrived. She had not learned then how coolly Felicity herself
had selected that destiny and taken it in hand. She had not surmised
with what dispassionate judgment she had husbanded her resources, once
the route was chosen.

And she wouldn't believe the evidence of her own eyes and ears, at
first. It never happened this way--it couldn't! Such things were the
black fruit of one reckless moment; of nameless impulses; of bitter
betrayal. Someone had written something like that. One more
unfortunate, rashly importunate--that was it. She couldn't remember
the rest. And then her suspense, which was half fearsome expectancy,
was overwhelmed by a thought which really frightened her.

If all that they had taught her wasn't so; if all that she had accepted
so blindly wasn't the literal truth, inexorable for every individual
(life was a too bitterly personal thing for her to concern herself with
a doctrine which, accurate in the main, could be shrugged aside when it
failed in isolated cases) then all the rest, all that she had clung to
just as blindly, could be a lie. And if it was--if it was--

The thought struck at all she knew, all she had, her creed and code and
hope of to-morrow.

Felicity when she burst in with the news that she had landed
Fiegenspann did a wild can-can up and down the room. She danced as no
one else ever saw her dance, in a surrender to exultation that was
wanton savagery. But her mood passed quickly. The next moment, like
an implacable campaigner, she was summing up the excellences of her
latest step.

"Now you watch