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Blanche LeHaye, the garrulous, was strangely silent. When she stepped about it was in the manner of one who is fearful of wakening a sleeper. When she caught the eyes of either of the other women her own glance dropped.

When Ethel Morrissey came in with the blue-and-white gingham aprons Blanche LeHaye hesitated a long minute before picking hers up. Then she held it by both sleeves and looked at it long, and curiously. When she looked up again she found the eyes of the other two upon her. She slipped the apron over her head with a nervous little laugh.

“I’ve been a pair of pink tights so long,” she said, “that I guess I’ve almost forgotten how to be a woman. But once I get this on I’ll bet I can come back.”

She proved it from the moment that she measured out the first cupful of brown sugar for the caramel icing. She shed her rings, and pinned her hair back from her forehead, and tucked up her sleeves, and as Emma McChesney watched her a resolve grew in her mind.

The cake disposed of–“Give me some potatoes to peel, will you?” said Blanche LeHaye, suddenly. “Give ’em to me in a brown crock, with a chip out of the side. There’s certain things always goes hand-in-hand in your mind. You can’t think of one without the other. Now, Lillian Russell and cold cream is one; and new potatoes and brown crocks is another.”

She peeled potatoes, sitting hunched up on the kitchen chair with her high heels caught back of the top rung. She chopped spinach until her face was scarlet, and her hair hung in limp strands at the back of her neck. She skinned tomatoes. She scoured pans. She wiped up the white oilcloth table-top with a capable and soapy hand. The heat and bustle of the little kitchen seemed to work some miraculous change in her. Her eyes brightened. Her lips smiled. Once, Emma McChesney and Ethel Morrissey exchanged covert looks when they heard her crooning one of those tuneless chants that women hum when they wring out dishcloths in soapy water.

After dinner, in the cool of the sitting-room, with the shades drawn, and their skirts tucked halfway to their knees, things looked propitious for that first stroke in the plan which had worked itself out in Emma McChesney’s alert mind. She caught Blanche LeHaye’s eye, and smiled.

“This beats burlesquing, doesn’t it?” she said. She leaned forward a bit in her chair. “Tell me, Miss LeHaye, haven’t you ever thought of quitting that–the stage–and turning to something–something–“

“Something decent?” Blanche LeHaye finished for her. “I used to. I’ve got over that. Now all I ask is to get a laugh when I kick the comedian’s hat off with my toe.”

“But there must have been a time–” insinuated Emma McChesney, gently.

Blanche LeHaye grinned broadly at the two women who were watching her so intently.

“I think I ought to tell you,” she began, “that I never was a minister’s daughter, and I don’t remember ever havin’ been deserted by my sweetheart when I was young and trusting. If I was to draw a picture of my life it would look like one of those charts that the weather bureau gets out–one of those high and low barometer things, all uphill and downhill like a chain of mountains in a kid’s geography.”

She shut her eyes and lay back in the depths of the leather-cushioned chair. The three sat in silence for a moment.

“Look here,” said Emma McChesney, suddenly, rising and coming over to the woman in the big chair, “that’s not the life for a woman like you. I can get you a place in our office–not much, perhaps, but something decent–something to start with. If you–“

“For that matter,” put in Ethel Morrissey, quickly, “I could get you something right here in our store. I’ve been there long enough to have some say-so, and if I recommend you they’d start you in the basement at first, and then, if you made good, they advance you right along.”

Blanche LeHaye stood up and, twisting her arm around at the back, began to unbutton her gingham apron.

“I guess you think I’m a bad one, don’t you? Well, maybe I am. But I’m not the worst. I’ve got a brother. He lives out West, and he’s rich, and married, and respectable. You know the way a man can climb out of the mud, while a woman just can’t wade out of it? Well, that’s the way it was with us. His wife’s a regular society bug. She wouldn’t admit that there was any such truck as me, unless, maybe, the Municipal Protective League, or something, of her town, got to waging a war against burlesque shows. I hadn’t seen Len–that’s my brother—in years and years. Then one night in Omaha, I glimmed him sitting down in the B. H. row. His face just seemed to rise up at me out of the audience. He recognized me, too. Say, men are all alike. What they see in a dingy, half-fed, ignorant bunch like us, I don’t know. But the minute a man goes to Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, or somewhere on business he’ll hunt up a burlesque show, and what’s more, he’ll enjoy it. Funny. Well, Len waited for me after the show, and we had a talk. He told me his troubles, and I told him some of mine, and when we got through I wouldn’t have swapped with him. His wife’s a wonder. She’s climbed to the top of the ladder in her town. And she’s pretty, and young-looking, and a regular swell. Len says their home is one of the kind where the rubberneck auto stops while the spieler tells the crowd who lives there, and how he made his money. But they haven’t any kids, Len told me. He’s crazy about ’em. But his wife don’t want any. I wish you could have seen Len’s face when he was talking about it.”