She found it at last. On the west side of the Village she was attracted by a neat card bearing the words “furnished rooms” on the door of a brick house that looked many degrees better kept than its neighbours. A shy grey-haired woman admitted her. There were several rooms, all spotless, and she selected one reasonably priced, with white painted woodwork and plain furniture that she thought she might manage to live with. When she asked for the telephone to send for her luggage from the hotel, she was shown into the daughter’s room. In one corner of this pure haven was a small, square stand covered with chintz and draped with flowered cretonne. Upon it stood a discarded perfume bottle filled with holy water, a prayer-book and catechism, and a tall white statuette of the Virgin and child, with the monogram M. A. on the rococo base. On the wall above the stand was a black crucifix with the Christ in gilt. Behind the Christ was thrust a little palm cross. Still higher than the crucifix hung a photo-engraving of the Madonna and child from some Italian master, in a gilded frame. The homely simplicity of the scene brought tears to the girl’s eyes.... But she felt a little less benevolent the next day when she asked Mrs. McCabe why there were no mirrors in the bathroom. That lady gazed at her with the sad severity of the timid and replied: “I don’t know. There just ain’t, and there won’t be.” In this atmosphere of staggering piety began the career of “Mary Smith.” XVI By the end of two years Moira had repaid the last of the five hundred with which she had possessed herself on leaving Thornhill; and accumulated a surplus of her own. From the day she quitted the Munson School of Stenography and Typewriting she had never experienced difficulty in securing a job and in making an excellent impression. The two changes which she had made were of her own volition. For more than six months now she had been secretary to the executive vice-president of a soap company and had become something of an executive herself, on a salary that still had a good margin in which to grow. This man was typical of the average young organizing and selling marvel of the day, but he had a quality of intelligence in matters outside of business--limited, yet enough to be refreshing after the others she had encountered. Moira did not feel, as she had in other places, that she must suppress all the evidences of her breeding and education. This she had actually attempted to do hitherto; diplomatically ignoring awkward and ungrammatical English, adopting as much slang as she could retain without practice on the outside, and generally pretending to be quite as much the low brow as most of the other girls whose chatter bewildered her in the washroom.