ported a simple rectangle of cardboard advertising the
tenancy of (in engraved script) _Miss Lucy Spode_, (in ink) _M. A.
Warden_, and (in pencil, a scrawl) _Manvers_.

Through this the girl walked into a back room of generous size, which
boasted a top-light together with the generic name of studio, and
was furnished with an ill-assorted company of lame and dismal pieces.
The several vocations of its tenants were indicated by a
typewriting-machine beneath a rubber hood thick with dust, a folding
metal music-stand and a violin-case, and a large studio easel
supplemented by a number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition
wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed
"hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove
for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese screen of dilapidated
panels.

Near the windows, on the end of a box-couch, a young woman was
perched, thin shoulders rounded over the ink-stained drawing-board
resting on her knees. She had a large, self-willed mouth and dark
Bohemian hair, and wore a dreary cotton kimono over a silk petticoat
whose past had been lurid. One hand clutched gingerly a bottle of
India ink, the other wielded a scratchy steel drafting-pen.

Interrupted, she looked up with a start that all but spilled the ink
and cried in a voice heavily coloured with the enervating brogue of
the Southern born:

"My land, Sally! _What_ time is it?"

In the act of unpinning her hat (a straw that even a drowning woman
would have hesitated to grasp at) Miss Manvers paused to consult an
invalid alarm-clock which was suffering palpitations on an
adjacent shelf.

"Twenty past three," she reported, sententious.

The artist cocked her head, squinted malevolently at her drawing,
dipped, and busily scratched once more.

"Scared me," she explained: "coming home so early!"

Sally removed her collar with a wrench and a grunt: "Got a date?"

"Sure; with Sammy--four o'clock."

"Salamander stuff, eh?"

"What do you want--a day like this? I'm half-cooked already, and I
guess I can go through a little fire for the sake of a sixty-cent
_table d' hote_ and a trip to Coney. But you needn't worry; it'll be
hotter than this before Sammy warms up enough to singe anything. His
intentions are so praiseworthy they pain him; he blushes every time he
has to recognise the sex question long enough to discuss the delights
of monogamy in a two-family house within commuting