They didn't leave me till they'd stripped me clean. I felt like a Christmas tree the day after. But, somehow, I didn't care. VIII. Is that you, Mag? Well, it's about time you came home to look after me. Fine chaperon you make, Miss Monahan! Why, didn't I tell you the very day we took this flat what a chaperon was, and that you'd have to be mine? Imagine Nancy Olden without a chaperon--Shocking! No, 'tisn't late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool and talk to you. Think of us two--Cruelty girls, both of us--two mangy kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing with cold and hunger and dirt, out in the wet--think of us two in our own flat, Mag! I say, it makes me proud of us! There are times when I look at every stick of furniture we own, and I try to pretend to it all that I'm used to a decent roof over my head, and a dining-room, kitchen, parlor, bedroom and bath. Oh, and I forgot the telephone the other tenant left here till its lease is up. But at other times I stand here in the middle of it and cry out to it, in my heart: "Look at me, Nancy Olden, a householder, a rent-payer, the head of the family, even if it's only a family of two and the other one Mag! Look at me, with my name in the directory, a-paying milk bills and meat bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of my own, where nobody's right's greater than my own; where no one has a right but me and Mag; a place where--where there's nothing to hide from the police!" There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says--(I went to see it the other night, so that I could take off the Ophelia--she used to be a good mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It spoils you, this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty graft. You lose the quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the hunted. And--worse--you lose your taste for the old risky life. You grow proud and fat, and you love every stick in the dear, quiet little place that's your home--your own home. You love it so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it could see you--you who'd always walked upright before it with the step of the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing to prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face! And, Mag, you try--if you're me--to fit Tom Dorgan in here--Tom Dorgan in stripes and savage sulks still--all these months--kept away from the world, even the world behind bars! Maggie, don't you wish Tom was a ventriloquist or--or an acrobat or--but this isn't what I had to tell you. Do you know what a society entertainer is, Miss Monahan? No? Well, look at me. Yes, I'm one. Miss Nance Olden, whose services are worth fifty dollars a night--at least, they were one night.