matron and had
her put me out! She said the language I'd used before her was
positively vicious. She said I'd--contaminate--those--worthy--working
girls!"

And it took Felicity almost three-quarters of an hour to bring her
round. In one brief interval of calm she managed to slip to the
telephone and call a taxi. The rest of the time she spent on her knees
beside the girl in the chair crooning softly. And she never knew that
most of the words she set to her soothing, extemporaneous tune would
have contaminated anybody, most of all Mrs. Schuyler Driggs herself.

At eleven-thirty, when Cecille was crying comfortably, she rose. And
seeing that her work was well done, she became brisk.

"I'll get a bawling out from Fiegenspann," she said, and ran to a
window. "Thank God, that taxi's here. And now you'd better get to
bed. Maybe hereafter you'll know better than to mix it with somebody
outa your class. You oughta known in the first place that perfect
ladies have got it all over girls like us, before we start. They've
got everything fixed, the judges and the referee, before you step into
the ring."

She ran out--and flashed back.

"Don't get me wrong, Cele." For one reason or another she hurried it.
"I ain't got time to explain just what I meant to say, but there's one
thing I didn't mean. Don't get me wrong. If you ain't a lady, then
I'm the Prince of Wales."

That was the second time Cecille heard it.

"A girl like us."

After a time her sobs subsided until they were no more than long,
unsteady breaths. But she stayed at the window, staring down into the
street. Once she dug the knuckles of one fist into her eyes and
wistfully shook her head.

"I wonder," she whispered. "I wonder."

CHAPTER V

CHAMPION! CHAMPION!

Perry Blair, champion lightweight of the world, stood on the corner of
Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, deep in contemplation of a quaint
phase of our present-day democracy.

It was a fertile spot for such moralizing, albeit somewhat exposed for
one attempting philosophy in a fall-weight overcoat. For nowhere in
all this world could one hope to come upon a crowd better schooled in
the rules of hero-worship, American-style, than this eleventh-hour mob
which was pouring like tide-rips from side-street theaters into the
city's main thoroughfare.

Much has been written, of a distinctly pathetic flavor, concerning the
case of a king without a throne. From days immemorial suc