Miss Izzy and I shook hands. She smiled brightly upon me and hoped I was in good health. She evidently knew all about me, and had no need of George’s introduction. I observed that she had a lot of glossy, brown hair, which she wore twisted up in a coil on the top of her head in a way I had never seen hair arranged before, and which was kept in its place by long things like skewers, with large coloured balls at their ends. She wore a pince-nez, and was neatly dressed in dark blue, with a white linen collar and white cuffs, rather mannish in type. It was very plain to me that Miss Izzy had a great deal of style. She had also good features, but her femininity had been slightly eclipsed by a tremendous air of business efficiency, and by the severity of her pince-nez. I had never yet seen anybody nearly so business-like as Miss Izzy looked, and if I had been an employer of labour I should have engaged her as manager at a large salary on the spot. Through the open door there came the shrill angry voices of small boys playing football in an alley at the side of the house. There was a squabble in progress, a cross-fire of abusive language suddenly broken by cries of, “Start a new match――Start a new match.” George was standing against the counter, and had begun to pick his teeth with a pin extracted from the bottom of his waistcoat. Miss Izzy went back to her task of arranging a pile of new books, evidently just come in. She was working out an elaborate pattern with their pictured covers, and as she did so she read the titles aloud. “‘The Hour of Vengeance,’” she proclaimed. “‘In Love’s Sweet Bondage,’” she added, more dreamily. “‘The Clue of the Broken Ruby’; ‘Cynthia Cyrilhurst’――it’s well for people that have names like that!” “I don’t think much of it,” said George. Miss Izzy sighed, “It’s better than some, any way.” “Don’t you like your own name?” I ventured. “My Christian name’s all right. But there’s no use being called Althea, if it isn’t going to be backed up by anything! Althea Izzy is neither one thing nor another.” “You can easily remedy that!” declared George, gallantly, from the midst of his dental experiments. Miss Izzy scrutinised him. “It wouldn’t be McAllister that would do it,” she said. But George continued placidly to attend to his teeth. “I hear Miss Johnson’s getting married at eight o’clock next Friday,” he remarked. Miss Izzy bounced round, knocking over a box of note-paper. “How do _you_ know?” she demanded, glaring at him. “Oh, I just heard,” said George, calmly. He carefully inspected the pin before returning it to his waistcoat. “‘Just heard!’――through the key-hole, I suppose. It strikes me you ‘just hear’ a deal you’re not meant to. And they don’t want it talked about――mind that!” “Why don’t they want it talked about,” I asked. “Because they want a quiet wedding. She’s in a bakery, and he’s a clerk in Nicholl’s, and, if it got out, the church would be full.”