not a trace of the tenement working girl of a week
and a day before. Here was beauty in bloom, fresh and alluring
from head to narrow, well-booted feet. More than a hint of a
fine color sense--that vital quality, if fashion, the
conventional, is to be refined and individualized into style,
the rare--more than a hint of color sense showed in the harmony
of the pearl gray in the big feather, the pearl gray in the
collar of the blouse, and the pearl white of her skin. Susan had
indeed returned to her own class. She had left it, a small-town
girl with more than a suggestion of the child in eyes and mouth;
she had returned to it, a young woman of the city, with that
look in her face which only experience can give--experience that
has resulted in growth. She locked all her possessions away in
her trunk--all but her money; that she put in her
stockings--seventy-five dollars well down in the right leg, the
rest of the bills well down in the left leg; the two dollars or
so in change was all she intrusted to the pocketbook she
carried. She cast a coquettish glance down at her charmingly
arrayed feet--a harmless glance of coquetry that will be
condemned by those whose physical vanity happens to center
elsewhere. After this glance she dropped her skirts--and was ready.

By this time dusk had fallen, and it was nearly six o'clock. As
she came out of the house she glanced toward the west--the
instinctive gesture of people who live in rainy climates. Her
face brightened; she saw an omen in the long broad streak of
reddened evening sky.

CHAPTER XXIII

SHE went down to Fourth Street, along it to Race, to the
_Commercial_ building. At the entrance to the corridor at the far
side of which were elevator and stairway, she paused and
considered. She turned into the business office.

"Is Mr. Roderick Spenser here?" she asked of a heavily built,
gray-bearded man in the respectable black of the old-fashioned
financial employee, showing the sobriety and stolidity of his
character in his dress.

"He works upstairs," replied the old man, beaming approvingly
upon the pretty, stylish young woman.

"Is he there now?"

"I'll telephone." He went into the rear office, presently
returned with the news that Mr. Spenser had that moment left,
was probably on his way down in the elevator. "And you'll catch
him if you go to the office entrance right away."

Susan, the inexperienced in the city ways of men with women, did
not