honey for a fortnight. If you feel
mad, you'd better keep it in your insides." Then she answered his
questions. "No, I ain't goin' to lie, and I ain't goin' to tell
anybody else to lie," said she. "Lying ain't my style. But it ain't
anybody's business how old you are, anyhow. I don't know what right a
man that I go to get a place from has got to ask how old I be. All he
has any right to know is whether I ain't too old to do my work. I
don't lie; no, siree. All I say is, and kinder laugh, 'Well, call it
twenty-five,' or you might call it thirty, and with some, again, you
might call it thirty-two or three. That ain't lyin' if I know what
lyin' is." As the woman spoke her face assumed precisely the
mischievous, challenging smile with which she had replied to similar
questions. Carroll laughed, and the other man also, although
grudgingly.

"Well," he said, "there's different ways of looking at a lie."

"It wouldn't be any manner of use for you to say you wouldn't see
twenty-eight again, no matter how much you got fixed up," the woman
retorted. "But I guess you can get something, if it ain't quite so
good. I have a gentleman friend who is over fifty and who said he was
thirty-seven, and he got a dandy place last week. But I tell you
you'll have to hustle more'n this other gentleman. You're bald, ain't
you?"

"I don't know what that has got to do with it," growled the man, and
he tried to quicken his pace; but she kept up with him.

"It's got a good deal to do with it," said she. "I know a place on
Sixth Avenue where you can get an elegant front-piece that nobody
could ever tell, for three dollars and forty-nine cents. Another
gentleman friend of mine--he's a sort of relation of mine; my sister
was his first wife--got one there. Yes, sir, you'll have to get one,
and you'll have to get your face massaged and your eyebrows blacked,
and, Lord! you'll have to have that beard shaved off and have a
mustache, if you get anything at all. Lord! you look as if you'd come
right out of the Old Testament. I don't see why you're wasting your
time hanging around offices for, without you see to that, first of
all. I should think your wife would tell you, but I suppose she's the
same sort. Now as for you," she added, turning again to Carroll, "if
you just get polished up a little bit--say, here's the card of my
beauty-doctor" (she produced a card from an ornate wrist-bag)--"you'll
look dandy."

Suddenly the woman, with a quick good-bye