ays she sends 'em money every month, but with the
understanding that they don't try to come to see her. They live way over
on the West Side somewhere. She makes her buying trip to Europe every
year. Speaks French and everything. They say when she started to earn
real money she just cut loose from her folks. They was a drag on her and
she wanted to get to the top."

"Say, that pin's real, ain't it?"

"Real? Well, I should say it is! Catch Jevne wearing anything that's
phony. I saw her at the theatre one night. Dressed! Well, you'd have
thought that birds of paradise were national pests, like English
sparrows. Not that she looked loud. But that quiet, rich elegance, you
know, that just smells of money. Say, but I'll bet she has her lonesome
evenings!"

Ray Willets' eyes darted across the long room and rested upon the
shining black-clad figure of Miss Jevne moving about against the
luxurious ivory-and-rose background of the French Room.

"She--she left her folks, h'm?" she mused aloud.

Miss Myrtle, the brainless, regarded the tips of her shabby boots.

"What did it get her?" she asked as though to herself. "I know what it
does to a girl, seeing and handling stuff that's made for millionaires,
you get a taste for it yourself. Take it from me, it ain't the
six-dollar girl that needs looking after. She's taking her little pay
envelope home to her mother that's a widow and it goes to buy milk for
the kids. Sometimes I think the more you get the more you want.
Somebody ought to turn that vice inquiry on to the tracks of that
thirty-dollar-a-week girl in the Irish crochet waist and the diamond bar
pin. She'd make swell readin'."

There fell a little silence between the two--a silence of which neither
was conscious. Both were thinking, Myrtle disjointedly, purposelessly,
all unconscious that her slow, untrained mind had groped for a great and
vital truth and found it; Ray quickly, eagerly, connectedly, a new and
daring resolve growing with lightning rapidity.

"There's another new baby at our house," she said aloud suddenly. "It
cries all night pretty near."

"Ain't they fierce?" laughed Myrtle. "And yet I dunno--"

She fell silent again. Then with the half-sign with which we waken from
day dreams she moved away in response to the beckoning finger of a
saleswoman in the evening-coat section. Ten minutes later her exquisite
face rose above the soft folds of a black charmeuse coat that rippled
away from her slender, su