her peace," solemnly misquoted Gloria.

"But—but—but Maud and Helen and I," pursued the girl, evincing symptoms of a melancholic relapse, "were going to be the Three Honest Working-Girls and keep up our Fifty-Sixth Street bachelor-girl hall for life. And now look at the darn thing!"

"What did you expect?" argued Gloria. "Maud is pretty and energetic, and Helen is one of those soft, fluffy creatures that some man always wants to take care of. Bachelor-girl agreements are only made to keep until the right man comes along, anyway."

"But where do I come in?" demanded Darcy, opening wide her discontented-looking eyes.

"Oh, you'll be getting engaged yourself one of these days."

For once in her tactful life Gloria Greene had made a stupid remark.

"Don't you patronize me!" flashed the girl. "I just won't stand it! I get enough of that at home from those two d—-d fiancées."

Gloria turned a face of twinkling astonishment upon her visitor. "Why, Amanda Darcy Cole! What would the generations of your Puritan forbears—"

"Don't you call me Amanda, either! It's an old-maid name. I hate it—even if it does fit."

"It is rather a handicap," admitted her hostess. "But Darcy's pretty enough, anyway."

"It's the only pretty thing about me. Oh, Gloria," burst out the girl in a sudden flood-tide of self-revelation, "if you knew how I long to be pretty! Not beautiful, like you; I wouldn't ask as much as that. But just pretty enough to be noticed once in a while."

"Why, Darcy, dear—"

"No: let me talk!" Darcy proceeded in little, jerky gasps of eagerness. "Pretty. And well-dressed. And up-to-date. And smart. And everything! I'd sell my soul to the devil if he'd buy such a weakly, puny, piffling little soul, just really to live and be something besides a 'thoroughly nice girl' for one short year. 'A thoroughly nice girl'! Yah!" said Miss Cole in a manner which, whatever else it might have been, was not thoroughly nice.

"That's a rotten thing to say about any one," agreed the sympathetic Gloria. "Who calls you that?"

"The girls. You know the way they say it! Well, no wonder. Look at me!" she cried in passionate conclusion to her passionate outburst.

Gloria looked at her. She beheld an ungirlish frump of a thing with a lank but bulgy figure misclothed in woefully inappropriate garments, a muddy complexion, a sagging mouth, a drooping chin, a mass of deranged hair, and big, deep-gray, lusterless eyes, which implored her. The older woman considered and marveled.

"My dear child," she said gently, "are you sure it isn't some man?"

"I don't care a darn for any man in the world," returned the other with convincing promptitude. "It isn't that. It's just that I'm not—I don't—" Her courage seemed to ebb out, but she gained command of herself and continued plaintively: "All I want is to be in the game as other girls play it—to have a little attention and maybe a box of candy or some flowers once in a while: not to have men look past me like a tree. It isn't much to ask, is it? If you knew how tired I am of being just plain nobody! There's a—a somebody inside here"—she thumped her narrow, ribby chest—"but I can't get it out." Rising lumpily to her feet, she stretched out hands of piteous and grotesque appeal. "Please, Gloria," she prayed in a dwindling and saintly voice, "I want to raise just a little teeny bit of hell before I die."

A flash of sympathy and comprehension from the actress's intent face answered this noble aspiration. "Why, you're real, aren't you!" she exclaimed.

"Did you think I wasn't even that?" returned the other reproachfully.

"Not so many people are. It's something, anyway. Are you going to be honest, as