dwiches, which we swallowed mechanically, regarding
one another and our surroundings with stupid bewilderment. I had never
met any of these people before, though they had all been my
fellow-lodgers.

The girl sitting on the cot next to mine passed her cup up for more
coffee, and as she did so turned a quizzical gaze upon me. She was
stupid and ugly. Her quizzical look deepened into curiosity, and by and
by she asked:

"Youse didn't live there too, did youse?"

Our common misfortune inspired me to a cordial reply, and we fell into a
discussion of the catastrophe. Her English was so sadly perverted and
her voice so guttural that I could make out her meaning only with the
greatest exercise of the imagination. But it was to the effect that the
fire had started in a room on the top floor, whither poor old Mrs.
Pringle had gone about three o'clock in the afternoon with a bucket of
coal for the fire. Just what happened nobody knew. Every one on the top
floor at the time had perished, including Mrs. Pringle.

"Didn't youse get nothin' out, neither?" asked my companion. And then
it dawned upon me for the first time that I had nothing in all the world
now but the clothes on my back and the promise of work on the morrow.

"Yes, I have lost everything," I answered.

"Youse got anything in the bank?" she pursued.

The question seemed to me ironical and not worthy of notice.

"I have. I've got 'most five hundred dollars saved up," she went on.

"Five hundred dollars!"

The girl nodded. "Huh, that's what! I could live tony if I wanted, but I
like to save my money. I makes good money, too,--twelve dollars a
week,--and I don't spend it, neither."

"What do you do?" I asked, regarding the large, rough hands with
something like admiration for their earning abilities.

"I'm a lady-buffer," she answered, with a touch of pride.

"A lady-buffer! What's that?" I cried, looking at the slovenly,
dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her
shoulders to the cot. She regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and
then delivered herself of an axiom.

"A lady-buffer is a lady what buffs." And, to render the definition
still more explicit, she rolled up the sleeve of her wrapper, showed me
mighty biceps, and then with her arm performed several rapid revolutions
in midair.

"What do you buff?" I next ventured.

"Brass!"

This laconic reply squelched me completely, and I subsided without
further conversati