"Didn't you ask him to go there with you?" "Sure; but he's no amachure." "Are you?" "What?" "An amateur?" "No, this Jane ain't." "Will you go quietly into the next room with the matron and tell her all about it? The court does not want to have to deal too harshly with a girl like you. Do you want to engage counsel and have your case go over? If there is a chance, I don't want to have to send a girl like you away." "Aw, you--you're a poodle and a great Dane!" "Ten days," said the judge, rather wearily. The bridge officer took up the next slip from the pile of them, his voice the droning quality of a bee bumbling through sultry air: "Maizie Smith. Officer Jerry Dinwiddie." * * * * * Spring and her annual epidemic of aching hearts and aching joints had advanced ten days and ten degrees. The season's first straw replacement of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very East Sixties began to smell. When a strangely larger-eyed, strangely thinner, a whitened and somehow a tightened Stella Schump drew up, those ten days later, before the little old row with the little old iron balconies, there was already in the ridiculous patches of front yards a light-green powdering of grass, and from the doorbell of her own threshold there hung quite a little spray of roses, waxy white against a frond of fern and a fold of black. Deeper within that threshold, at the business of flooding its floor with a run of water from a tipped pail and sweeping harshly into it, was the vigorous, bony silhouette of Mrs. O'Connor, landlady. For the second that it took her presence to be felt, Miss Schump stood there trembling, all of a sudden more deeply and more rapidly. Then, Mrs. O'Connor leaned out, bare arms folded atop her broom. "So!" she said, a highly imperfect row of lower teeth seeming to jut out, and her voice wavy with brogue and vibrant to express all its scorn. "So!" "Mrs. O'Connor--" "So! Ye've come back in time for the buryin'! Faith, an' it's a foine toime for the showin'-up of the chief mourner! Faith now it is!" "Mrs. O'Connor--" "Ain't ye ashamed? Ain't ye ashamed before the Lord to face your Maker?" "Please--please--Mrs. O'Connor--what--what--" "The pasty-faced lyin' ways of ye! I can see now how ye look what ye are! I'd have believed it as soon of my own. It's the still water that run deep in ye, is the way your girl friend put it. The hussy under that white complexion of yours! Your sainted mither! Oh, ain't ye ashamed in the name of the Lord to face your Maker?" "O God--please what--" "Your sainted mither! Niver, after that letter from ye the next night after her scourin' the city, a whimper more out of her--"