rowded car, swinging on the straps as it screeched its
way around the curves, through the crowded portions of the city. It
was long before they got seats, three-quarters of an hour, for they
lived far out. Ten dollars a week does not give much in the way of
quarters. It might have been guessed that these two were partners,
room-mates.

"Gee! These cars is fierce," said Annie Squires, with a smile and a
wide glance into the eyes of a young man against whom she had been
flung, although she spoke to her companion.

Mary Warren made no complaint. Her face, calm and gentle, carried
neither repining nor resignation, but a high and resolute courage. She
shrank far as she might, like a gentlewoman, from personal contact with
other human beings; the little droop beginning at the corners of her
mouth gave proof of her weariness, but there was a thoroughbred vigor,
a silken-strong fairness about her, which, with the self-respecting
erectness in her carriage, rather belied the common garb she wore. Her
frock was that of the sales-woman, her gloves were badly worn, her
boots began to show signs of breaking, her hat was of nondescript sort,
of small pretensions--yet Mary Warren's attitude, less of weariness
than of resistance, had something of the ivory-fine gentlewoman about
it, even here at the end of a rasping winter day.

Annie Squires was dressed with a trifle more of the pretension which
ten dollars a week allows. She carried a sort of rude and frank
vitality about her, a healthful color in her face, not wholly uncomely.
She was a trifle younger than Mary Warren--the latter might have been
perhaps five and twenty; perhaps a little older, perhaps not quite so
old--but none the less seemed if not the more strong, at least the more
self-confident of the two. A great-heart, Annie Squires; out of
nothing, bound for nowhere. Two great-hearts, indeed, these two tired
girls, going home.

"Well, the Dutch seems to be having their own troubles now," said Annie
after a time, when at length the two were able to find seats, a trifle
to themselves in a corner of the car. "Looks like they might learn how
the war thing goes the other way 'round. Gee! I wish't I was a man!
I'd show 'em peace!"

She went on, passing from one headline to the next of the evening paper
which they took daily turns in buying. Mary Warren began to grow more
grave of face as she heard the news from the lands where not long ago
had swung and raged in