a minute." Ida, with bedroom slippers clattering,
hurried back to her room, returned with a bottle of bromo
seltzer and in the bathroom fixed Susan a dose. "You'll feel
all right in half an hour or so. Gee, but you're swell--with
your own bathroom."

Susan shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

Ida shook her head gravely. "You ought to save your money. I do."

"Later--perhaps. Just now--I _must_ have a fling."

Ida seemed to understand. She went on to say: "I was in
millinery. But in this town there's nothing in anything unless
you have capital or a backer. I got tired of working for five
per, with ten or fifteen as the top notch. So I quit, kissed
my folks up in Harlem good-by and came down to look about. As
soon as I've saved enough I'm going to start a business. That'll
be about a couple of years--maybe sooner, if I find an angel."

"I'm thinking of the stage."

"Cut it out!" cried Ida. "It's on the bum. There's more money
and less worry in straight sporting--if you keep respectable.
Of course, there's nothing in out and out sporting."

"Oh, I haven't decided on anything. My head is better."

"Sure! If the dose I gave you don't knock it you can get one
at the drug store two blocks up Sixth Avenue that'll do the
trick. Got a dinner date?"

"No. I haven't anything on hand."

"I think you and I might work together," said Ida. "You're
thin and tallish. I'm short and fattish. We'd catch 'em
coming and going."

"That sounds good," said Susan.

"You're new to--to the business?"

"In a way--yes."

"I thought so. We all soon get a kind of a professional look.
You haven't got it. Still, so many dead respectable women
imitate nowadays, and paint and use loud perfumes, that
sporting women aren't nearly so noticeable. Seems to me the
men's tastes even for what they want at home are getting louder
and louder all the time. They hate anything that looks slow.
And in our business it's harder and harder to please them--except
the yaps from the little towns and the college boys. A woman
has to be up to snuff if she gets on. If she looks what she
is, men won't have her--nor if she is what she looks."

Susan had not lived where every form of viciousness is openly
discussed and practiced, without having learned the things
necessary to a full understanding of Ida's technical phrases
and references. The liveliness that had come with the
departure of the headache vanished. To change the subj