"I should be ashamed to be silly about fellows, the way some girls are,"

was her inward comment. "But I'd just like to have people see me with a

thing like that dangling around me. And I shall, some time. I'm a whole

heap prettier than she is."

The carriage door shut abruptly. Lena's too thin boots, out of plumb,

suddenly slipped on a half-formed piece of ice. She made a desperate

grab at the smooth surface of the window and then came ignominiously

down--not wholly ignominiously, however, since her accident brought to

her aid the man who was a type.

She didn't have to stop to consider that the man would notice neither

her hat nor her boots. She knew it instinctively and instantly. But the

rose-petal face and the big eyes were overwhelmingly present to her

consciousness. She saw them reflected in the look on his face as he bent

over her.

"I hope you're not hurt."

"Not in the least. Only humiliated." Lena smiled, because people are

always attracted by cheerfulness.

"You are sure you have not twisted your ankle?" he insisted.

"Nothing but my hat and my hair," she pouted. "Thank you for coming to

my rescue."

"It wasn't much of a rescue," he said.

"Are you sorry I didn't have a tragedy and give you a chance to play

hero?" she inquired naïvely.

"When you are in need, may I be the one to help?" he said with growing

boldness.

Lena flushed and nodded as he lifted his hat and was gone. She walked

slowly homeward, actually forgetting to stop at her favorite window in

the lace store, so occupied was she with the latest story she was

telling herself. It was a story in which a large house with soft rugs

and becoming pink lights occupied the foreground, and somewhere in the

background hovered a man who was a type and who loved to spend money on

diamonds. The vision was so lovable that she lived with it all the way,

even through the narrow entrance of the lodging-house and up the narrow

stairs, saturated with obsolete smells--smells of dead dinners--to the

very instant when she opened the upper door and faced bald reality and

her mother. Mrs. Quincy sat by the window in a room on the walls of

which the word "shabby" was written in a handwriting as plain, and in

language far simpler than ever Belshazzar saw on the walls of Babylon.

It fairly cried itself from the big-figured paper, peeling along its

edges; from the worn painted floor; from the frayed rug of now

patternless carpet; from the sideboard that looked like a parlor organ.

Even from the closet door it whispered that there was more shabbiness

hidden in the depths.

Mrs. Quincy herself was a part of it, for she was to Lena what the faded

rose is to the opening one, a once beautiful woman, whose skin now

looked like wrinkled cream.




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