for the position. Miss Clarke engaged her at once.

Emeline met, as she had expected, a storm at home, but she weathered it,
and kept her position. It was hard work, and poorly paid, but the girl's
dreams gilded everything, and she loved the excitement of making sales,
came eagerly to the gossip and joking of her fellow-workers every
morning, and really felt herself to be in the current of life at last.

Miss Clarke was no better than her reputation, and would have willingly
helped her young saleswoman into a different sort of life. But Emeline's
little streak of shrewd selfishness saved her. Emeline indulged in a
hundred little coarsenesses and indiscretions, but take the final step
toward ruin she would not. Nobody was going to get the better of her,
she boasted. She used rouge and lip red. She "met fellers" under flaming
gas jets, and went to dance halls with them, and to the Sunday picnics
that were her father's especial abomination; she shyly told vile stories
and timidly used strong words, but there it ended. Perhaps some tattered
remnant of the golden dream still hung before her eyes; perhaps she
still clung to the hope of a dim, wonderful time to come.

More than that, the boys she knew were not a vicious lot; the Jimmies
and Johnnies, the Dans and Eds, were for the most part neighbours, no
more anxious to antagonize Emeline's father than she was. They might
kiss her good-night at her door, they might deliberately try to get the
girls to miss the last train home from the picnic, but their spirit was
of idle mischief rather than malice, and a stinging slap from Emeline's
hand afforded them, as it did her, a certain shamed satisfaction.

George Page came into "Delphine's" on a windy summer afternoon when
Emeline had been there for nearly five years. He was a salesman for some
lines of tailored hats, a San Franciscan, but employed by a New York
wholesale house. Emeline chanced to be alone in the place, for Miss
Clarke was sick in bed, and the other saleswoman away on her vacation.
The trimmers, glancing out through a plush curtain at the rear, saw Miss
Cox and the "drummer" absorbed in a three hours' conversation. From two
to five o'clock they talked; the drummer watching her in obvious
admiration when an occasional customer interrupted, and when Miss Cox
went home the drummer escorted her. Emeline had left the parental roof
some two years before; she was rooming, now, with a mild and virtuous
girl named Regina L