it. I'm game for anything. I'm 'north of fifty-three'!"
"You're what?"
"Have you forgotten the 'Rhyme of the Three Sealers'? 'There's never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three'! Well, the age of twenty-seven is a woman's fifty-three, north latitude-at least, it is if she's unmarried-time to jettison scruples, morals, regard for the conventions, and hoist the black flag of social piracy!"
"In plain language, you think the hour has struck to doll yourself up like a man-trap. What?"
"Yes-and hang the expense!"
"By all means, hang it. But where? It's a case of cash or credit; the first you haven't got, and I don't see your visible means of supporting a charge-account at Altman's."
"There are ways," Sally insisted darkly.
"You can't mean you'd do anything dishonest-"
"I'd do anything. Look at all the people in high places who began as nothing more nor less than adventurers. Nobody's fussing about how they got their money. It's a sin to be poor nowadays, but the sin of sins is to stay poor!"
A moment of silence followed this pronouncement; then Miss Spode observed pensively:
"Something's happened to you to-day, Sally. What is it? You haven't been-"
"Fired again'? Not exactly. Just laid off indefinitely-that's all. With good luck I may get my job back next September."
"Oh, but honey!" Lucy exclaimed, crossing to drop a hand on Sally's shoulder: "I am sorry!"
"Of course you are," Sally returned stonily. "But you needn't be. I'm not going to let this make things any harder for you and Mary Warden."
"How perfectly mean! You know I wasn't thinking anything like that!"
"Yes, dear, I do know it." In sudden contrition, Sally caught the other girl's hand and laid her cheek transiently against it. "What I meant to make clear was" – she faltered momentarily-"I've made up my mind I'm a Jonah, and the only decent thing for me to do is to quit you both, Lucy, my dear!"
She ended on a round note of determination rather than of defiance, and endured calmly, if with a slightly self-conscious smile, the distressed look of her companion.
"Don't be silly!" this last retorted, pulling herself together. "You know you're welcome-"
"Of course I do. All the same, I'm not taking any more, thanks."
"But it's only a question of time. If you can't wait for Huckster's to take you on again, Mary and I can easily keep things going until you find another job."
"But that wouldn't be fair!"
"What wouldn't be fair?"
"To sponge on you two under false pretences." "False pretences!" Lucy iterated blankly.
"I was laid off last Saturday. I didn't say anything, but I've been looking for something else ever since-and this is Wednesday, and I'm through. I'm sick and tired. I've got just as much right as anybody to live on society, and that's what I'm going to do from now on!"
Miss Spode lowered a cloth skirt over her head and blouse before pursuing. "But what I can't understand is how-assuming you're in earnest-"
"Deadly earnest!" Sally declared.
" – and mean to go through with this-how you think you'll get a start without doing something downright wrong."
"It wouldn't be fair to tempt me the way I feel to-day."
"There's only one thing," Miss Spode announced, adjusting her hat, "that prevents me from speaking to a cop about you: I know you're a fraud. You couldn't do anything dishonourable to save you."
"Oh, couldn't I!" Sally returned ominously. "You wait and see!"
"Well, well," said the other indulgently, "have it your own way. Hooray for crime! But if I stop here listening to you preach anarchy I'll be late for Sammy. So I'm off." Pausing in the doorway, she looked back with just a trace of doubt colouring her regard. "Do try to brace up and be sensible, honey. I'm worried about leaving you alone with all these blue devils."
"You needn't be. I can take care of myself-"
"Well, promise to do nothing rash before I come home."
"Promises made for keeps are specifically prohibited by article nine of the Social Pirate's Letters of Marque. But I don't mind telling you the chances are you'll find me on the roof when you get back, unless this heat lets up. I'm going up now; this place is simply suffocating!"
But her smile grew dim as she resigned herself to an evening whose loneliness promised to be unbroken; that faint flush faded which had crept into her cheeks in the course of her half-whimsical, half-serious harangue; she looked once more what life had made her-a work-worn shop-girl, of lack-lustre charm, on the verge of prematurely middle-aged, hopeless spinsterhood.
Another six months of this life would break her, body and spirit, beyond repair.
Her eyes, that ranged the confines of those mean quarters, darkened quickly with their expression of jaded discontent.
Another six months? She felt as if she could not suffer another six hours..
After a time she rose and moved languidly out into the hall, from which an iron ladder led up through a scuttle to the roof, the refuge and retreat of the studio's tenants on those breathless, interminable summer nights when their quarters were unendurably stuffy. Here they were free to lounge at ease, en déshabillé; neither the dressmaker nor the teacher of voice-production ever troubled their privacy, and seldom did other figures appear on any of the roofs which ran to the Park Avenue corner on an exact plane broken only by low dividing walls and chimney-stacks.
Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with (by way of local colour) on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered elfin limbs.
Selecting the soundest chair, Sally dragged it into the shadow cast by the hood of the studio top-light, and settling down with her feet on the adjacent coping, closed her eyes and sought to relax from her temper of high, almost hysterical nervous tension.
Thoughts bred of her talk with Lucy for a time distracted her, blending into incoherent essays at imaginative adventures staged in the homes and parks of the wealthy, as pictured by the sycophantic fashion magazine and cast with the people of its gallery of photographs-sublimely smart women in frocks of marvellous inspiration, and polo-playing, motor-driving, clothes-mad men of an insouciance appalling.
On the edge of unconsciousness she said aloud, but without knowing that she spoke, three words.
These were: "Charmeuse.. Paquin.. Bride."
And then she slept; her pallid face upturned to that high-arched sky of brass, from which light and heat beat down in brutal waves, she slept the sleep of exhaustion, deep and heavy; dark and stupefying sleep possessed her utterly, as overpowering and obliterating as though induced by drugs.
CHAPTER II
BURGLARY
She wakened in sharp panic, bewildered
