ghting.
Hitherto her impulse had been to run away from the scorn of her
inferiority; now she was asking herself what would happen if she took
up its challenge and fought it on its own ground. What if I do? was
the way the question framed itself, but aloud she made it.

"If I said I would, what would happen first?"

"We'd go and get a license. Then we'd find a minister. After that I
should give you something to eat, and then I'd take you home."

"Where would that be?"

He gave her his address in East Sixty-seventh Street, only a few doors
from Fifth Avenue, but her social sophistication was not up to the
point of seeing the significance of this. Neither did her imagination
try to picture the home or to see it otherwise than as an alternative
to the police-station, or worse, as a lodging for the night.

"And what would happen to me when I got to your home?"

"You'd have your own room. I shouldn't interfere with you. You'd
hardly ever see me. You could stay as long as you liked or as short as
you liked, after the first week or two."

There was that about him which carried conviction. She believed him.
As an alternative to having nowhere to go, what he offered her was
something, and something with that spice of adventure of which she had
been dreaming only a few minutes earlier. She couldn't be worse off
than she was now, and if it gave her the chance of a hand-to-hand
tussle with the world-pride which had never done anything but look
down on her, she would be fighting what she held as her worst enemy.
She braced herself to say,

"All right; I'll do it."

He, too, braced himself. "Very well! Let's start."

The impetuosity of his motion almost took her breath away as she tried
to keep pace with him.

"By the way, what's your name?" he asked, before they reached Fifth
Avenue.

She told him, but was too overwhelmed with what she had undertaken to
dare to ask him his.

Chapter IV

"Nao!"

The strong cockney negative was also an exclamation. It came from Mrs.
Courage, the cook-housekeeper, who stood near the kitchen range making
the coffee for breakfast. She was a woman who looked her name, born
not merely to do battle, but to enjoy being in the midst of it.

Jane, the waitress, was the next to speak. "Nettie Duckett, you ought
to be ashymed to sye them words, you that's been taught to 'ope the
best of everyone."

Jane had fluttered in from the pantry with the covered dish for the
toast. Jane stil