and believes of you what it likes. Then you went over to
the Metropolitan, stopped living in hotels, took this apartment, and
began to know people. Stein discontinued his pantomime at the right
moment, withdrew his patronage. Ruby, of course, did not go back to
shirtwaists. A business friend of Stein's took her over, and she dropped
out of sight. Last winter, one cold, snowy night, I saw her once again.
She was going into a saloon hotel with a tough-looking young fellow. She
had been drinking, she was shabby, and her blue shoes left stains in the
slush. But she still looked amazingly, convincingly like a battered,
hardened Kitty Ayrshire. As I saw her going up the brass-edged stairs, I
said to myself--"

"Never mind that." Kitty rose quickly, took an impatient step to the
hearth, and thrust one shining porcelain slipper out to the fire. "The
girl doesn't interest me. There is nothing I can do about her, and of
course she never looked like me at all. But what did Stein do without
me?"

"Stein? Oh, he chose a new role. He married with great
magnificence--married a Miss Mandelbaum, a California heiress. Her
people have a line of department stores along the Pacific Coast. The
Steins now inhabit a great house on Fifth Avenue that used to belong to
people of a very different sort. To old New-Yorkers, it's an historic
house."

Kitty laughed, and sat down on the end of her couch nearest her guest;
sat upright, without cushions.

"I imagine I know more about that house than you do. Let me tell you how
I made the sequel to your story.

"It has to do with Peppo Amoretti. You may remember that I brought Peppo
to this country, and brought him in, too, the year the war broke out,
when it wasn't easy to get boys who hadn't done military service out of
Italy. I had taken him to Munich to have some singing lessons. After the
war came on we had to get from Munich to Naples in order to sail at all.
We were told that we could take only hand luggage on the railways, but I
took nine trunks and Peppo. I dressed Peppo in knickerbockers, made him
brush his curls down over his ears like doughnuts, and carry a little
violin-case. It took us eleven days to reach Naples. I got my trunks
through purely by personal persuasion. Once at Naples, I had a frightful
time getting Peppo on the boat. I declared him as hand-luggage; he was so
travel-worn and so crushed by his absurd appearance that he did not look
like much else. One inspector had a sen