distance of
Prospect Park South."

"You don't mean to say you've got that far along--already!"

"That's the reward of a year's steady angling, honey."

"Heavens, but how you must carry on with Sammy!"

"Believe me, it's something scandalous," sighed Lucy Spode.

"But why--" Sally began in a tone of expostulation.

The other quickened with a flash of temper. "Don't ask me! I came
No'th to study art and mingle with the world of intellect and fashion,
and after three years I'm drawing heads for fashion magazines at a
dollar per, and I know a minor poet who's acquainted with the
assistant editor of _The Scrap-Book_, and the one man I know who owns
a dress-suit gets fifty cents an hour for posing in it. If that isn't
enough to make me welcome even the prospect of married life with Sammy
Myerick and a woman to do the washing, I don't know--"

"Well, if you aren't crazy about Sammy, why not chuck him? Marriage
isn't the last resource for a girl like you. You've got just as many
wits to live on as the next one. This town's full of young women no
better-looking than either of us, and with even less intelligence, who
manage pretty comfortably, thank you, on the living the world owes
them."

"Sally Manvers!" cried the Southern girl, scandalised, "what a way to
talk!"

"Oh, _all_ right," said the other indifferently. "Where's Mary
Warden?"

"Lyric Hall-rehearsing."

"Lucky Mary!"

Lucy Spode looked up in astonishment. "Lucky!" she protested; "dancing
till she's ready to drop, in this awful heat, and no pay for
rehearsals!"

"All the same," Sally contended, "she's got some chance, some right to
hope for better things. She's an understudy, and her principal might
fall ill--or something. That's better than marrying a man you don't
care for--or clerking at Huckster's for seven dollars a week."

"Cat," said Miss Spode dispassionately. "Who's been mussing your fur?"

"Life."

The steel pen was poised again while Lucy Spode surveyed Sally Manvers
suspiciously.

"What do you mean--life?" she demanded.

"This sort of thing." Sally waved a comprehensive hand. "Living here,
in this hole, and most of the time not even able to pay my share of
the rent; slaving for a dollar a day, and losing part of that in
unjust fines; walking to and from the store to save car fare; eating
the sort of food we do eat; never having pretty clothes or pleasures
of any sort. I don't call this a life!"

"You've got indigestion," Miss Spade