asion of his entering the flats. He had lingered outside
the lift in the entrance hall waiting for the lift-boy, who generally
conducts strangers to the various floors. But this bright-eyed falcon
of a girl had openly refused to endure such official delay. She said
sharply that she knew all about the lift, and was not dependent on
boys--or men either. Though her flat was only three floors above, she
managed in the few seconds of ascent to give Flambeau a great many of
her fundamental views in an off-hand manner; they were to the general
effect that she was a modern working woman and loved modern working
machinery. Her bright black eyes blazed with abstract anger against
those who rebuke mechanic science and ask for the return of romance.
Everyone, she said, ought to be able to manage machines, just as she
could manage the lift. She seemed almost to resent the fact of Flambeau
opening the lift-door for her; and that gentleman went up to his own
apartments smiling with somewhat mingled feelings at the memory of such
spit-fire self-dependence.

She certainly had a temper, of a snappy, practical sort; the gestures of
her thin, elegant hands were abrupt or even destructive.

Once Flambeau entered her office on some typewriting business, and found
she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the
middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids
of an ethical tirade about the "sickly medical notions" and the morbid
admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister
to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She
asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass
eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.

Flambeau, quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from
asking Miss Pauline (with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles
was a more morbid sign of weakness than a lift, and why, if science
might help us in the one effort, it might not help us in the other.

"That is so different," said Pauline Stacey, loftily. "Batteries and
motors and all those things are marks of the force of man--yes, Mr.
Flambeau, and the force of woman, too! We shall take our turn at these
great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and
splendid--that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the
doctors sell--why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick
on