ut the
trouble was that Lise had had to wait for two more pay-days and endure
the suspense arising from the possibility that some young lady of taste
and means might meanwhile become its happy proprietor. Had not the
saleslady been obdurate, Lise would have had it on credit; but she did
succeed, by an initial payment the ensuing Saturday, in having it
withdrawn from public gaze. The second Saturday Lise triumphantly brought
the cloak home; a velvet cloak,--if the eyes could be believed,--velvet
bordering on plush, with a dark purple ground delicately and artistically
spotted with a lilac to match the hat feathers, and edged with a material
which--if not too impudently examined and no questions asked--might be
mistaken, by the uninitiated male, for the fur of a white fox. Both
investments had been made, needless to say, on the strength of Janet's
increased salary; and Lise, when Janet had surprised her before the
bureau rapturously surveying the combination, justified herself with a
defiant apology.

"I just had to have something--what with winter coming on," she declared,
seizing the hand mirror in order to view the back. "You might as well get
your clothes chick, while you're about it--and I didn't have to dig up
twenty bones, neither--nor anything like it--" a reflection on Janet's
most blue suit and her abnormal extravagance. For it was Lise's habit to
carry the war into the enemy's country. "Sadie's dippy about it--says it
puts her in mind of one of the swells snapshotted in last Sunday's
supplement. Well, dearie, how does the effect get you?" and she wheeled
around for her sister's inspection.

"If you take my advice, you'll be careful not to be caught out in the
rain."

"What's chewin' you now?" demanded Lise. She was not lacking in
imagination of a certain sort, and Janet's remark did not fail in its
purpose of summoning up a somewhat abject image of herself in wet velvet
and bedraggled feathers--an image suggestive of a certain hunted type of
woman Lise and her kind held in peculiar horror. And she was the more
resentful because she felt, instinctively, that the memory of this
suggestion would never be completely eradicated: it would persist, like a
canker, to mar the completeness of her enjoyment of these clothes. She
swung on Janet furiously.

"I get you, all right!" she cried. "I guess I know what's eatin' you!
You've got money to burn and you're sore because I spend mine to buy what
I need. You don't kn