"Aw, Miss Greg-or-ee!" Her voice was the downscale wail of an oboe. "Whatta you always picking on Harry Trimp for? He ain't ever done anything to you--and you said yourself when he brought them circular letters in that he was one handsome kid." "Just the same, I knew when he came in here the second time hanging round you with them blue eyes and black lashes, and that batch of get-rich-quick letters, he was as phony as his scarf-pin." "I glory in a fellow's spunk that can give up a clerking job and strike out for hisself--that's what I do!" "He was fired--that's how he started out for himself. Ask Mae Pope; she knows a thing or two about him." "Aw, Miss--" "Wait until you have been dealing with them as long as I have! Once get a line on a man's correspondence, and you can see through him as easy as through a looking-glass with the mercury rubbed off." The walls of Jericho fell at the blast of a ram's horn. Not so Miss Flint's frailer fortifications. "The minute a fellow that doesn't belong to the society of pikers and gets a three-figure salary comes along, and can take a girl to a restaurant where they begin with horse-doovries instead of wiping your cutlery on the table-cloth and deciding whether you want the 'and' with your ham fried or scrambled--the minute a fellow like that comes along and learns one of us girls that taxi-cabs was made for something besides dodging, and pink roses for something besides florist windows--that minute they put on another white-slave play, and your friends begin to recite the doxology to music. Gee! It's fierce!" "Gimme that second act, Goldie. Thank Gawd I can say that in all my years of experience I've never been made a fool of: and, if I do say it, I had chances in my time!" "You--you're the safest girl I know, Miss Gregory." "What?" "You're safe if you know the ropes, Miss Gregory." "What did you do with the Rheinhardt statement, Goldie? He'll be in for it any minute." "It's in your left-hand drawer, along with those contracts, Miss Gregory. I made two carbons." Miss Flint slid into her pressed-plush fourteen-dollar-and-a-half copy of a fourteen-hundred-fifty-dollar unborn-lamb coat, pulled her curls out from under the brim of her tight hat, and clasped a dyed-rat tippet about her neck so that her face flowered above it like a small rose out of its calyx. The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, the Fifth Dimension, and the American Shopgirl and How She Does Not Look It on Six Dollars a Week, and Milk-Chocolate Lunches are still the subjects that are flung like serpentine confetti across the pink candle-shades of four-fork dinners, and are wound like red tape round Uplift Societies and Ladies' Culture Clubs. Yet Goldie flourished on milk-chocolate lunches like the baby-food infants on the backs of magazines flourish on an add-hot-water-and-serve, twenty-five-cents-a-can substitute for motherhood. "Good night, Miss Gregory." "Night!"