in Goldie's own and
invariably won her a seat in the six-o'clock Subway rush, and a bold,
bad, flirtatious stare if she ventured to look above the third button of
a man's coat.

Goldie Flint, beneath whose too-openwork shirt-waist fluttered a heart
the tempo of which was love of life--and love of life on eight dollars a
week and ninety per cent. impure food, and a hall-room, more
specifically a standing room, is like a pink rose-bush that grows in a
slack heap and begs its warmth from ashes.

Goldie, however, up in her ninth-floor offices, and bent to an angle of
forty-five degrees over the denouement of white-slave drama that
promised a standing-room-only run and the free advertising of
censorship, had little time or concern for her various atrophies.

It was nearly six o'clock, and she wanted half a yard of pink tulle
before the shops closed. Besides, hers were the problems of the
six-million-dollar incorporateds, who hire girls for six dollars a week;
for the small-eyed, large-diamoned birds of prey who haunt the
glove-counters and lace departments of the six-million-dollar
incorporateds with invitations to dinner; and for the night courts,
which are struggling to stanch the open gap of the social wound with
medicated gauze instead of a tight tourniquet.

A yard of pink tulle cut to advantage would make a fresh yoke that would
brighten even a three-year-old, gasolene-cleaned blouse. Harry Trimp
liked pink tulle. Most Harry Trimps do.

At twenty minutes before six the lead-colored dusk of January crowded
into the Gregory typewriting office so thick that the two figures
before the two typewriters faded into the veil of gloom like a Corot
landscape faints into its own mist.

Miss Flint ripped the final sheet of her second act from the roll of her
machine, reached out a dim arm that was noisy with bracelets, and
clicked on the lights. The two figures at the typewriters, the
stationary wash-stand in the corner, a roll-top desk, and the
heat-lightning tints in Miss Flint's hair sprang out in the jaundiced
low candle-power.

"I'm done the second act, Miss Gregory. May I go now?"

Miss Flint's eyes were shining with the love-of-life lamps, the mica
powder of romance, and a brilliant anticipation of Harry Trimp. Miss
Gregory's were twenty years older and dulled like glass when you
breathed on it.

"Yes; if you got to go I guess you can."

"Ain't it a swell play, Miss Gregory? Ain't it grand where he pushes her
t