u down. It got me down. I used to have a fine
sucker--gave me a hundred a week and paid my flat rent. But I
had nothing else to do, so I took to drinking, and I got so
reckless that I let him catch me with my lover that time. But
I had to have somebody to spend the money on. Anyhow, it's no
fun having a John."

"A John?" said Susan. "What's that?"

"You are an innocent----!" laughed Maud. "A John's a sucker--a
fellow that keeps a girl. Well, it'd be no fun to have a John
unless you fooled him--would it?"

They now entered the side door of the hotel and ascended the
stairs. A dyspeptic looking man with a red nose that stood out
the more strongly for the sallowness of his skin and the
smallness of his sunken brown eyes had his hands spread upon
the office desk and was leaning on his stiff arms. "Hello,
Max," said Maud in a fresh, condescending way. "How's business?"

"Slow. Always slack on Sundays. How goes it with you, Maudie?"

"So--so. I manage to pick up a living in spite of the damn
chippies. I don't see why the hell they don't go into the
business regular and make something out of it, instead of
loving free. I'm down on a girl that's neither the one thing
nor the other. This is my lady friend, Miss Queenie." She
turned laughingly to Susan. "I never asked your last name."

"Brown."

"My, what a strange name!" cried Maud. Then, as the proprietor
laughed with the heartiness of tradesman at good customer's
jest, she said, "Going to set 'em up, Max?"

He pressed a button and rang a bell loudly. The responding
waiter departed with orders for a whiskey and two lithias.
Maud explained to Susan:

"Max used to be a prize-fighter. He was middleweight champion."

"I've been a lot of things in my days," said Max with pride.

"So I've heard," joked Maud. "They say they've got your
picture at headquarters."

"That's neither here nor there," said Max surlily. "Don't get
too flip." Susan drank her whiskey as soon as it came, and the
glow rushed to her ghastly face. Said Max with great politeness:

"You're having a little neuralgia, ain't you? I see your face
is swhole some."

"Yes," said Susan. "Neuralgia." Maud laughed hilariously.
Susan herself had ceased to brood over the incident. In
conventional lives, visited but rarely by perilous storms, by
disaster, such an event would be what is called concise. But
in life as it is lived by the masses of the people--life in
which awful di