ou would have put her down as one of the many well-dressed,
prosperous-looking women shoppers--if you hadn't looked at her feet.
Veteran clerks and policemen cannot disguise their feet.

Effie Bauer's reason for not marrying when a girl was the same as that of
most of the capable, wise-eyed, good-looking women one finds at the head
of departments. She had not had a chance. If Effie had been as
attractive at twenty as she was at--there, we won't betray confidences.
Still, it is certain that if Effie had been as attractive when a young
girl as she was when an old girl, she never would have been an old girl
and head of Spiegel's corset department at a salary of something very
comfortably over one hundred and twenty-five a month (and commissions).
Effie had improved with the years, and ripened with experience. She knew
her value. At twenty she had been pale, anaemic and bony, with a
startled-faun manner and bad teeth. Years of saleswomanship had
broadened her, mentally and physically, until she possessed a wide and
varied knowledge of that great and diversified subject known as human
nature. She knew human nature all the way from the fifty-nine-cent
girdles to the twenty-five-dollar made-to-orders. And if the years had
brought, among other things, a certain hardness about the jaw and a line
or two at the corners of the eyes, it was not surprising. You can't rub
up against the sharp edges of this world and expect to come out without a
scratch or so.

So much for Effie. Enter the hero. Webster defines a hero in romance as
the person who has the principal share in the transactions related. He
says nothing which would debar a gentleman just because he may be a
trifle bald and in the habit of combing his hair over the thin spot, and
he raises no objections to a matter of thickness and color in the region
of the back of the neck. Therefore Gabe I. Marks qualifies. Gabe was
the gentleman about whom Effie permitted herself to be guyed. He came to
Chicago on business four times a year, and he always took Effie to the
theater, and to supper afterward. On those occasions, Effie's gown, wrap
and hat were as correct in texture, lines, and paradise aigrettes as
those of any of her non-working sisters about her. On the morning
following these excursions into Lobsterdom, Effie would confide to her
friend, Miss Weinstein, of the lingeries and negligees:

"I was out with my friend, Mr. Marks, last evening. We went to Rector