he revelled in portraying the fire danger, but she covered her retreats
by masterful silence.

"My code is this," she would proclaim: "In passing, snatch! You can
discard at leisure."

There was no doubt but that Patricia did more than her share of
snatching. When she played, she played wildly, but she was a coward when
pay time came.

But who was there to show Patricia in her true light? Her good
qualities, and they were many, pleaded for her. She was too little and
sweet to be held to brutal exactions, and she was such a gay, blithesome
creature, at her maddest, that when she ran one felt more like
commending her speed than hurling epithets of scorn at her.

"If she wasn't a thousand times better than she makes herself out to
be," Sylvia confided to Joan, "I'd never let her into my studio; but Pat
is golden at heart, and she ought to be spanked for acting as she does."

"Hasn't she any family?" asked Joan. "No one whom she may--hurt?"

"That's it, my lamb, she hasn't. Mother died when she was four years
old; father, an actor, but devoted to her, and insisted upon trotting
her around with him. She was confided to the care of cheap
boarding-house women; she ran away from school once and travelled miles
alone to get to her father, and when he died--Pat was eighteen then--she
began her career, as she calls it. Snatch and skip!"

"Poor, dear, little Pat!" said Joan, and her eyes filled.

"There, now!" Sylvia exclaimed, "she's caught your imagination."

That was true, and by the magic Joan began to see life as Patricia said
_she_ saw it: a place of detached opportunities and no obligations.

"I believe," Patricia would say, looking her divinest, "that in
developing ourselves we most serve others. We relieve others of our
responsibilities; we express ourselves and have no gnawing ambitions to
sour us. Self-sacrifice is folly--it makes others mean and selfish,
others who may not hold a candle to us for usefulness. Now"--and here
Patricia, smoking her cigarette, would look impishly at Sylvia, quite
forgetting Joan--"take, for instance, Teddy Burke!"

"Pat!" Sylvia was in arms, "I will not hear of your actions with Mr.
Burke. They're disgraceful. You should be ashamed of them."

"On the other hand," Patricia always looked like a young saint, rather a
wild one, to be sure, when she spoke of Burke, "I'm proud of my defiance
of stupid limitations and fogyish ideals. Here is a man, a corker, Joan,
with a wife who, acti