eed a generous hand--a painful and shameful
truth which a society resolved at any cost to think well of
itself fiercely conceals from itself and hypocritically lies about.

She felt now that there was hope in only one direction--hope
of occupation that would enable her to live in physical, moral
and mental decency. She must find some employment where she
could as decently as might be realize upon her physical
assets. The stage would be best--but the stage was impossible,
at least for the time. Later on she would try for it; there
was in her mind not a doubt of that, for unsuspected of any
who knew her there lay, beneath her sweet and gentle exterior,
beneath her appearance of having been created especially for
love and laughter and sympathy, tenacity of purpose and daring
of ambition that were--rarely--hinted at the surface in her
moments of abstraction. However, just now the stage was
impossible. Spenser would find her immediately. She must go
into another part of town, must work at something that touched
his life at no point.

She had often been told that her figure would be one of her
chief assets as a player. And ready-made clothes fitted her
with very slight alterations--showing that she had a model
figure. The advertisements she had cut out were for cloak
models. Within an hour after she left Forty-fourth Street, she
found at Jeffries and Jonas, in Broadway a few doors below
Houston, a vacancy that had not yet been filled--though as a
rule all the help needed was got from the throng of applicants
waiting when the store opened.

"Come up to my office," said Jeffries, who happened to be near
the door as she entered. "We'll see how you shape up. We want
something extra--something dainty and catchy."

He was a short thick man, with flat feet, a flat face and an
almost bald head. In his flat nostrils, in the hollows of his
great forward bent ears and on the lobes were bunches of
coarse, stiff gray hairs. His eyebrows bristled; his small,
sly brown eyes twinkled with good nature and with sensuality.
His skin had the pallor that suggests kidney trouble. His
words issued from his thick mouth as if he were tasting each
beforehand--and liked the flavor. He led Susan into his private
office, closed the door, took a tape measure from his desk.
"Now, my dear," said he, eyeing her form gluttonously, "we'll
size you up--eh? You're exactly the build I like."

And under the pretense of taking her measureme