ides florist windows--that
minute they put on another white-slave play, and your friends begin to
recite the doxology to music. Gee! It's fierce!"

"Gimme that second act, Goldie. Thank Gawd I can say that in all my
years of experience I've never been made a fool of: and, if I do say it,
I had chances in my time!"

"You--you're the safest girl I know, Miss Gregory."

"What?"

"You're safe if you know the ropes, Miss Gregory."

"What did you do with the Rheinhardt statement, Goldie? He'll be in for
it any minute."

"It's in your left-hand drawer, along with those contracts, Miss
Gregory. I made two carbons."

Miss Flint slid into her pressed-plush fourteen-dollar-and-a-half copy
of a fourteen-hundred-fifty-dollar unborn-lamb coat, pulled her curls
out from under the brim of her tight hat, and clasped a dyed-rat tippet
about her neck so that her face flowered above it like a small rose out
of its calyx.

The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, the Fifth Dimension, and the American
Shopgirl and How She Does Not Look It on Six Dollars a Week, and
Milk-Chocolate Lunches are still the subjects that are flung like
serpentine confetti across the pink candle-shades of four-fork dinners,
and are wound like red tape round Uplift Societies and Ladies' Culture
Clubs.

Yet Goldie flourished on milk-chocolate lunches like the baby-food
infants on the backs of magazines flourish on an add-hot-water-and-serve,
twenty-five-cents-a-can substitute for motherhood.

"Good night, Miss Gregory."

"Night!"

Goldie closed the door softly behind her as though tiptoeing away from
the buzzing gnats of an eight-hour day. Simultaneously across the hall
the ground-glass door of the Underwriters' Realty Company swung open
with a gust, and Mr. Eddie Bopp, clerk, celibate, and aspirant for the
beyond of each state, bowed himself directly in Goldie's path.

"Ed-die! Ain't you early to-night, though! Since when are you keeping
board-of-directors hours?"

"I been watching for you, Goldie."

Eddie needs no introduction. He solicits coffee orders at your door. The
shipping-clerks and dustless-broom agents and lottery-ticket buyers of
the world are made of his stuff. Bronx apartment houses, with
perambulators and imitation marble columns in the down-stairs foyer, are
built for his destiny. He sells you a yard of silk; he travels to Coney
Island on hot Sunday afternoons; he bleaches on the bleachers; he
bookkeeps; he belongs to a building associ