“Oh, if I had known, if I had dreamed what I had been paid-in-advance to do! If I could have understood in time the stare of the floor-walker or the clerk’s reference to ‘the Juke’s slaughter of innocents’! But the hundred dollars was spent and he showed only surprise at my dismay. I begged him to let me work out the money in some other department of the store. But he said that even scrubbing required experience. He had nothing else for a girl without references to do.” The King scowled. “You really have diverted me so far, but your narrative style has slumped. It is an old trick, fair fiend, that of pricking up the interest with exclamation points.” “Hasn’t even a damned woman a right to some sacred feelings?” Sin interposed. “Even so, this is no confessional and I am no priest. Queer my attention never was called to this lingerie lord. He seems to be one of my own sort.” As Dolores forced herself again to look at His Majesty, she appreciated why his habit of wiping both lips with the tip of his tongue had seemed odiously familiar. “Have we no film in the Picture Storage Houses of the machinations of one Vincent Seff?” With a threat in his voice, Satan turned on the prime minister. Sin met the implication with bravado. “Seff is only a shopkeeper, Your Highness, a corking bad fellow, I know, but not of especial importance. Our storage space is overcrowded now with films of far worse than he.” Satan’s frown blackened. “He sounds promising to me. Should our Old Original be found guilty of another crime of omission---- However, we are to hear more of Seff and your maiden effort, are we not, sweet Grief? Pray proceed, cutting out those alack-and-alas passages. We shall assume that you were as innocent as your employer’s requirement at high noon of that fatal day. It is a reasonable assumption that everybody _is_ innocent in life’s A. M., eh? At times I take to pitying even myself for my state of innocuous naughtiness before that little set-to with the Great-I-Am. Come now, the tale--and see you give us the worst of it!” CHAPTER V From facts later learned, Dolores was able at this point to shift the viewpoint of her earth story from performer to audience. The incidents of that first morning’s payment in service of her financial debt she presented through the eyes of John Calvin Cabot, sole scion of a seventh generation of New Yorkers and a financier who, through his inherent aversion to idleness, was rated many times a millionaire. * * * * * The Cabots were late motoring down town, having been detained at their upper Fifth Avenue home by a domestic contretemps. The distress of it still hardened the lines of the man’s somewhat grim-featured face. Through the downward rush of many blocks, he pondered the first personal favor he had considered asking his wife in years. “Catherine,” he said at last, “I wish you’d come with me to some toy shop and help in the selection.”