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“What evening?” he said now. “How about to-morrow?” Sophy Gold shook her head. “Wednesday then? You stick to me and you’ll see Paris. Thursday?”

“I’m buying my own dinners,” said Sophy Gold.

Max Tack wagged a chiding forefinger at her.

“You little rascal!” No one had ever called Sophy Gold a little rascal before. “You stingy little rascal! Won’t give a poor lonesome fellow an evening’s pleasure, eh! The theatre? Want to go slumming?”

He was feeling his way now, a trifle puzzled. Usually he landed a buyer at the first shot. Of course you had to use tact and discrimination. Some you took to supper and to the naughty revues.

Occasionally you found a highbrow one who preferred the opera. Had he not sat through Parsifal the week before? And nearly died! Some wanted to begin at Tod Sloan’s bar and work their way up through Montmartre, ending with breakfast at the Pre Catalan. Those were the greedy ones. But this one!

“What’s she stalling for–with that face?” he asked himself.

Sophy Gold was moving toward the lift, the twinkling-eyed Miss Morrissey with her.

“I’m working too hard to play. Thanks, just the same. Good-night.”

Max Tack, his face blank, stood staring up at them as the lift began to ascend.

“Trazyem,” said Miss Morrissey grandly to the lift man.

“Third,” replied that linguistic person, unimpressed.

It turned out to be soothingly quiet and cool in Ella Morrissey’s room. She flicked on the light and turned an admiring glance on Sophy Gold.

“Is that your usual method?”

“I haven’t any method,” Miss Gold seated herself by the window. “But I’ve worked too hard for this job of mine to risk it by putting myself under obligations to any New York firm. It simply means that you’ve got to buy their goods. It isn’t fair to your firm.”

Miss Morrissey was busy with hooks and eyes and strings. Her utterance was jerky but concise. At one stage of her disrobing she breathed a great sigh of relief as she flung a heavy garment from her.

“There! That’s comfort! Nights like this I wish I had that back porch of our flat to sit on for just an hour. Ma has flower boxes all round it, and I bought one of those hammock couches last year. When I come home from the store summer evenings I peel and get into my old blue-and-white kimono and lie there, listening to the girl stirring the iced tea for supper, and knowing that Ma has a platter of her swell cold fish with egg sauce!” She relaxed into an armchair. “Tell me, do you always talk to men that way?”

Sophy Gold was still staring out the open window.

“They don’t bother me much, as a rule.”

“Max Tack isn’t a bad boy. He never wastes much time on me. I don’t buy his line. Max is all business. Of course he’s something of a smarty, and he does think he’s the first verse and chorus of Paris-by-night; but you can’t help liking him.”

“Well, I can,” said Sophy Gold, and her voice was a little bitter, “and without half trying.”

“Oh, I don’t say you weren’t right. I’ve always made it a rule to steer clear of the ax-grinders myself. There are plenty of girls who take everything they can get. I know that Max Tack is just padded with letters from old girls, beginning ‘Dear Kid,’ and ending, ‘Yours with a world of love!’ I don’t believe in that kind of thing, or in accepting things. Julia Harris, who buys for three departments in our store, drives up every morning in the French car that Parmentier’s gave her when she was here last year. That’s bad principle and poor taste. But–Well, you’re young; and there ought to be something besides business in your life.”

Sophy Gold turned her face from the window toward Miss Morrissey. It served to put a stamp of finality on what she said:

“There never will be. I don’t know anything but business. It’s the only thing I care about. I’ll be earning my ten thousand a year pretty soon.”