"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."

"Ten thousand a year is a lot; but it isn't everything. Oh, no, it isn't. Look here, dear; n.o.body knows better than I how this working and being independent and earning your own good money puts the stopper on any sentiment a girl might have in her; but don't let it sour you. You lose your illusions soon enough, goodness knows! There's no use in smashing 'em out of pure meanness."

"I don't see what illusions have got to do with Max Tack," interrupted Sophy Gold.

Miss Morrissey laughed her fat, comfortable chuckle.

"I suppose you're right, and I guess I've been getting a lee-tle bit nosey; but I'm pretty nearly old enough to be your mother. The girls kind of come to me and I talk to 'em. I guess they've spoiled me.

They--"

There came a smart rapping at the door, followed by certain giggling and swishing. Miss Morrissey smiled.

"That'll be some of 'em now. Just run and open the door, will you, like a nice little thing? I'm too beat out to move."

The swishing swelled to a mighty rustle as the door opened. Taffeta was good this year, and the three who entered were the last in the world to leave you in ignorance of that fact. Ella Morrissey presented her new friend to the three, giving the department each represented as one would mention a t.i.tle or order.

"The little plump one in black?--Ladies' and Misses' Ready-to-wear, Gates Company, Portland.... That's a pretty hat, Carrie. Get it to-day?

Give me a big black velvet every time. You can wear 'em with anything, and yet they're dressy too. Just now small hats are distinctly pa.s.sy.

"The handsome one who's dressed the way you always imagined the Parisiennes would dress, but don't?--Fancy Goods, Stein & Stack, San Francisco. Listen, Fan: don't go back to San Francisco with that stuff on your lips. It's all right in Paris, where all the women do it; but you know as well as I do that Morry Stein would take one look at you and then tell you to go upstairs and wash your face. Well, I'm just telling you as a friend.

"That little trick is the biggest lace buyer in the country.... No, you wouldn't, would you? Such a mite! Even if she does wear a twenty-eight blouse she's got a forty-two brain--haven't you, Belle? You didn't make a mistake with that blue crepe de chine, child. It's chic and yet it's girlish. And you can wear it on the floor, too, when you get home. It's quiet if it is stunning."

These five, as they sat there that June evening, knew what your wife and your sister and your mother would wear on Fifth Avenue or Michigan Avenue next October. On their shrewd, unerring judgment rested the success or failure of many hundreds of feminine garments. The lace for Miss Minnesota's lingerie; the jewelled comb in Miss Colorado's hair; the hat that would grace Miss New Hampshire; the dress for Madam Delaware--all were the results of their farsighted selection. They were foragers of feminine fal-lals, and their booty would be distributed from oyster cove to orange grove.

They were marcelled and manicured within an inch of their lives. They rustled and a pleasant perfume clung about them. Their hats were so smart that they gave you a shock. Their shoes were correct. Their skirts bunched where skirts should bunch that year or lay smooth where smoothness was decreed. They looked like the essence of frivolity--until you saw their eyes; and then you noticed that that which is liquid in sheltered women's eyes was crystallised in theirs.

Sophy Gold, listening to them, felt strangely out of it and plainer than ever.

"I'm taking tango lessons, Ella," chirped Miss Laces. "Every time I went to New York last year I sat and twiddled my thumbs while every one else was dancing. I've made up my mind I'll be in it this year."

"You girls are wonders!" Miss Morrissey marvelled. "I can't do it any more. If I was to work as hard as I have to during the day and then run round the way you do in the evening they'd have to hold services for me at sea. I'm getting old."

"You--old!" This from Miss Ready-to-Wear. "You're younger now than I'll ever be. Oh, Ella, I got six stunning models at Estelle Mornet's.

There's a business woman for you! Her place is smart from the ground floor up--not like the shabby old junk shops the others have. And she greets you herself. The personal touch! Let me tell you, it counts in business!"

"I'd go slow on those cape blouses if I were you; I don't think they're going to take at home. They look like regular Third Avenue style to me."

"Don't worry. I've hardly touched them."

They talked very directly, like men, when they discussed clothes; for to them a clothes talk meant a business talk.

The telephone buzzed. The three sprang up, rustling.

"That'll be for us, Ella," said Miss Fancy Goods. "We told the office to call us here. The boys are probably downstairs." She answered the call, turned, nodded, smoothed her gloves and preened her laces.

Ella Morrissey, in kimonoed comfort, waved a good-bye from her armchair.

"Have a good time! You all look lovely. Oh, we met Max Tack downstairs, looking like a grand duke!"

Pert Miss Laces turned at the door, giggling.