want soft
soap. Soft soap won't buy me bread an' butter, nor pay my debts.
Folks won't take any soft soap from me instead of money. They want
dollars an' cents, an' that's what I want every time, dollars an'
cents, an' not soft soap. Yes, it's dollars an'--cents--and not so-ft
soa-p." Suddenly the dress-maker, borne high on a wave of hysteria,
disclosing the innate coarseness which underlay all her veneer of
harmless gentility and fine manners, raised a loud, shrill laugh,
ending in a multitude of reverberations like a bell. There was about
this unnatural metallic laughter something fairly blood-curdling in
its disclosure of overstrained emotion. She laughed and laughed,
while the room was silent except for that, and every eye was fixed
upon her. Poor, little Estella Griggs, of all that accusing company
of Arthur Carroll's petty creditors, had the floor. She laughed and
laughed. She threw back her head. Her plumed hat was tilted rakishly
one side; her frizzes tossed high above her forehead, revealing the
meagre temples; her skinny throat seemed to elongate above her
ribboned collar; her thin cheeks, folded into a multitude of lines by
her distorting mirth, glowed with a hard red; her eyes gleamed with a
glassy brilliance. Then, suddenly, that long, skinny throat seemed to
swell visibly. She choked and gurgled, then came a wild burst of
sobbing. Hysteria had reached its second stage. It was frightful.

"Good God!" said one of the horsemen, under his breath.

"That's so," said the other. "Let's git out of this."

They elbowed their way out of the room. "See you again," one of them
said, curtly, to Carroll as he passed.

"See you to-morrow about that little affair of ours, an' by G--,
you've got to pony up, you can take your oath on that, an' don't you
forget it," whispered the other in Carroll's ear, with a fierce
emphasis, and yet he half grinned with a masculine sympathy in this
ultra crisis.

"It's gitting too thick," said the other horseman. "See you
to-morrow, and, by G--, you've got to do somethin' or there'll be
trouble."

Carroll nodded. He was ashy white. He had strong nerves, but he was
delicately organized, man though he was, and with unusual
self-control. He felt now a set of sensations verging on those
displayed by the laughing, sobbing woman before him. He was conscious
of an insane desire to join in that laugh, in those sobbing shrieks.
His throat became constricted, his hands became as ice. The tra