ist of them both in a few well-chosen
phrases! The theme of both is that when lovely--and lonely--woman stoops
to earning her own living she finds--not too late, but alas,
immediately--that men betray! That every prospect pleases and only man is
vile! These two heroines set out to make their own way; their faces are
their fortune and very nearly their finish! One is a very young girl, the
other an unhappy wife, fleeing with, and, one might be pardoned for
imagining, protected by, a young child. Each is a pattern of dewy
innocence and determined virtue, but no matter where they hie or hide,
the villains still pursue."

"Of course," said Miss Ellis in her small, smothered voice, "if you're
going to make a _joke_ of it----"

"My dear Miss Ellis, it _is_ a joke! One of them gets no further than
the station in her initial flight when she is accosted by a young
millionaire--insulted. (If you were a Constant Reader of popular
fiction, Michael Daragh, you'd know how difficult it is for millionaires
to retain the shreds of human decency.) And that's just the prelude,
but it introduces the motif which runs through the entire composition.
Staid, middle-aged husbands of friends, editors, business men,
authors,--Don Juans all! Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor,
lawyer, Indian chief, enmesh the road the ladies are to wander in."

"Well," said Michael Daragh, shaking his head, "I'm telling you there's a
rare lot of enmeshing, Jane Vail."

Emma Ellis wagged an eager head. "You can't possibly know, in your
sheltered life----"

"But I've been about a bit in my day--(didn't I come from my verdant
village to the wicked metropolis?)--and I've known men in all ages and
stages. My feeling is that these girls must have had a small
'come-hither' in one eye at least, or occasionally men might have passed
the butter without a sinister meaning, might have seen them home without
attempting to abduct them!"

"You came directly to Mrs. Hills, whom you had known for years," said
Emma Ellis. "And you knew that Mr. Harrison who helped you to place your
writing, and you had enough money to live on."

"But I've roamed the city alone, all hours of night or day, and I used to
go back and forth to boarding-school alone--a day's and a night's
journey, and abroad I used to trot off to galleries and museums by
myself, and----"

"But you always had your background, Jane Vail, the way you knew how safe
you were."

"You can't prove these bo