like that."

"It is a miserable business," Rose assented. "It's a thoroughly
contemptible business. But Mr. Culver didn't drag you into it
deliberately. You were passing the door as we stood talking, and he used
you for an illustration. But afterward he said that if you told him it
was all right to give me a job, he would do it. That's what I have come
up to ask you to do."

"That," said the judge, setting his teeth and breathing hard, "is the
most monstrous piece of impudence I have ever heard of. On his part as
well as yours. What have I to do with John Culver's waitresses?"

He wasn't expecting an answer to this question, but Rose had one ready
for him.

"You've given him the idea, without meaning to most likely, that you
wouldn't tolerate a girl among them who'd been earning her living on the
stage. If that's just a stupid mistake of his, I'm asking you to tell
him so."

"Well, I won't," said the judge. "The thing's preposterous. You're
asking me for what amounts to a guarantee. In the first place, I don't
know that you're not--after all--what you say you convinced Culver that
you were not."

"I think you do," said Rose thoughtfully, with a steady look he angrily
turned away from. "I think you knew, without any reason at all, just
from your instinct and your experience in judging people. And if you
don't know it that way, I think you can prove it to yourself by common
sense. Do you think it likely that if a girl of my--appearance
and--manners, had a mind to practise the--profession you've talked
about, she would be here in Centropolis, fighting desperately like this,
going through humiliations like this, for a chance to be a waitress in
Mr. Culver's dining-room?"

She stopped there and took a good deep breath and waited. There was a
solid minute of silence. The judge got up out of his chair and began
pacing the room with short impatient steps. He stopped with a jerk two
or three times, as if he were about to demolish her with speech, but
always gave up the attempt before a word was spoken.

"Oh, I admit it's a hard case," he said at last. "You've apparently been
a victim of circumstance. The people down in this part of the country
are perhaps narrow. In the main it's a good sort of narrowness. It's
better than the broadness of your cities. But in an isolated case it may
work an injustice." Then he wheeled on her. "But I can't do anything for
you. Can't you see that I can't do anything for you?"

"I don'