She was good-looking, well dressed, and judging by her features and coloring a daughter of foreign parents, though she spoke without accent. Her manner was so pointedly offensive, so evidently aimed at me, that the woman at my side resented it. “’Tain’t the lady’s fault,” she reproved the girl. “She’s done all she could to get the dead horse took away.” “Sure she’s done all she _could_,” the girl retorted, taking her eyes off me long enough to wink at her thin companion. “But I’ve noticed that social workers never do anything that the rich don’t want done. Oh, I’m not blaming you,” she added, addressing me directly in the same sneering tone. “If I made my living distributing crumbs from millionaires’ tables I’d do just as you do—perhaps.” “Perhaps you might,” I consented cheerfully, glad to get a candid opinion of social workers from the class among whom they work. “But, as it happens, you’ve missed your guess. I’m an inspector for the A. S. P. C. A. That dead horse is a menace to the dogs in my district.” “Menace to dogs!” the thin girl giggled, and she broke the straw through which she was drinking. “Thinks they’ll do more for dogs than children!” “She thinks dead right. The animal society’s got a lot of rich swells behind it,” the soda boy asserted. “That oughtn’t to surprise you,” the stout girl remarked, turning on her thin friend. “You heard that lady from Park Avenue”—how she sneered the word _lady_—“call that bow-legged little boy a monster because she thought he was mistreating a yellow pup.” With her soda-water still untasted she turned back to me. “Little bow-legs said he was seven, but he didn’t look to be more than five. He’d been playing in the park with his younger brother and sister, and was taking them home. One of the younger ones was leading the pup, had a string in its collar. They’d got as far as Park Avenue when madame pounced on them. The names she called those three kids!” “The pup was a poor, dear helpless doggie,” the thin girl giggled. “She said the pup was half-starved,” the stout girl went on. “I believe she was right about that. The children didn’t look as if either of them had ever had a square meal.” “That’s the way they all are—those rich women,” asserted a man in overalls, who was standing at the prescription-counter. “They think more of animals than of their own kind. What did youse say to the jane?” “Who, us?” the thin girl giggled between draws on her straw. “We kept out of her sight. We work in a specialty shop on Fifth Avenue, and she was one of our regular customers.” “’Fraid of you job,” the man in overalls commented. “Knockin’ the bread out your own mouth wouldn’t help the kids none.” “It would help the kids if we’d make the city government clean the tenement streets instead of wasting time dusting in front of vacant houses. They don’t get much more than dust, and those houses are vacant ten months in the year,” the stout girl asserted, as staring at me she waited for me to reply.