aid she, "and if I don't get what's
owing me before long, I shall either have to take one of them places
or get a dose." She said the last word with an indescribably hideous
significance. Her blue eyes seemed to blaze at Carroll.

Then the other girl pressed closer. "You needn't talk that way," said
she to the girl. "You know that I--"

"I ain't goin' to live on you," returned the other girl, violently.
People were beginning to look at the group.

"Now, you know, May," said the other girl, "my room is plenty big
enough for two, and I'm earning plenty to give you a bite till you
get a place yourself, and you know you may get that place you went to
see about yesterday."

"No, I won't," said May. "It seems to me it's pretty hard lines that
a poor girl can't get the money she's worked as hard for as I have."

The other girl pushed herself in front of May and spoke to Carroll,
and there was something womanly and beautiful in her face. "I have a
real good place," she said, in a low voice, and she enunciated like a
lady. "A real good place, and I'll look out for May till she gets
one, and I can wait until you are able to pay me."

"I will pay you all as soon as possible. I give you all my word I
will pay you in the end," said Carroll.

He seemed to see the three go out in a sort of dream. It did not
really seem to him that it was he, Arthur Carroll, who was sitting
there in that smoking, greasy atmosphere, before that table covered
with a stained cloth, over which the waiter had ostentatiously spread
a damp napkin, with that bowl of canned tomato-soup before him, and
that thick cup of coffee, with those three unhappy young creditors,
who had reviled and, worse than reviled, pitied him, passing out,
with the open glances of amused curiosity fastened upon him on every
side.

"Guess that dude is down on his luck," he heard a young man at his
left say.

"Guess he put the money he'd ought to have paid that young lady with
into his overcoat," his companion, a girl with a picture-hat, and a
wide lace collar over her coat, responded.

Carroll felt that he was overwhelmed, beaten, at bay before utter
ignominy. The thought flashed across him, as he tried to swallow some
more of the soup, that in some respects, if he had been a murderer or
a great bank defaulter with detectives on his track, the situation
would at least have been more endurable. The horrible pettiness of it
all, constituted the maddening sting of it. While h