“Oh, fairly. . . . Old rags anyway. . . . I didn’t get a new _thing_!” Then she leaned down again and began to take out perhaps a dozen petticoats that shone in the light, and silk night-dresses and bloomers and a pink satin corset, and gray suède shoes with cut-steel buckles, and some gold shoes with straps and _ostrich_ feather rosettes on the ankles, and some dark blue patent leather shoes with _red stitching_, and _red heels_! And as she did, she and Viola talked of people and places I had never _met_, and of how _frightful_ the dinner had been, and of the “utterly hideous rooms!” After quite a little time of this--although I suppose it seemed longer to me than it really was--Leslie sagged down on the corner of a trunk she had not yet opened, and hinted about some past chapters of her story that interested me and that was to have its love scene added in Florence, which I then, of course, didn’t know. “I came here,” she stated, as she looked straight and hard ahead of her, “on pique.” “I _knew_ it!” murmured Viola. “Nonsense!” Leslie answered, sharply. “Why how would _you_ know?” “Dear, I saw you were _suffering_--” That smoothed Leslie; I could see her feathers settle, and when she went on all the irritation had left her voice. “Some one,” she confided, “and it doesn’t matter in the least who, since he has gone from my life--I assure you I have absolutely put every _thought_ of him away--intimated that I could do nothing but be a butterfly. He was brutal, absolutely _brutal_! “And I--perfectly enraged--said I could work, and I would show him that I could. And that very night--Vi, are you sitting on my ostrich feather fan?--oh, all right, I thought I saw something pink there; no, I don’t mind the scarf--” “Go on, dear,” said Viola, after her exploration and a wiggle that settled her again. “That very night,” Leslie continued, “I telephoned Aunt Sheila, who happened to be in town and at the Plaza, and I told her I intended to come here and study with Signor Paggi. She was just as _mean_ as she could be. ‘Very well, Leslie,’ she said in that crisp way in which she often speaks. ‘But he won’t keep pupils who don’t work--’ . . . ‘_He will keep me_,’ I answered, and my voice shook. . . . I was fearfully overwrought--my heart had already been _trampled upon_--” I thought that sounded silly, but Viola didn’t, because she said, “My _dear_!” rather breathed it out as if some one had taken her lungs and squeezed them just as she began to speak. Leslie looked up at the ceiling and swallowed hard, in a way she considered tragic, and it was, but it also made me think of Roberta’s canary when it drinks. Then she rubbed her brow, laughed mirthlessly, and ended with, “_and here I am_!” “The bath tub’s the worst,” said Viola, which sort of took the cream off of Leslie’s tragic moment, and I could see that Leslie didn’t like it, for she frowned.