Through this the girl walked into a back room of generous size, which boasted a top-light together with the generic name of studio, and was furnished with an ill-assorted company of lame and dismal pieces. The several vocations of its tenants were indicated by a typewriting-machine beneath a rubber hood thick with dust, a folding metal music-stand and a violin-case, and a large studio easel supplemented by a number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed "hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese screen of dilapidated panels. Near the windows, on the end of a box-couch, a young woman was perched, thin shoulders rounded over the ink-stained drawing-board resting on her knees. She had a large, self-willed mouth and dark Bohemian hair, and wore a dreary cotton kimono over a silk petticoat whose past had been lurid. One hand clutched gingerly a bottle of India ink, the other wielded a scratchy steel drafting-pen. Interrupted, she looked up with a start that all but spilled the ink and cried in a voice heavily coloured with the enervating brogue of the Southern born: "My land, Sally! _What_ time is it?" In the act of unpinning her hat (a straw that even a drowning woman would have hesitated to grasp at) Miss Manvers paused to consult an invalid alarm-clock which was suffering palpitations on an adjacent shelf. "Twenty past three," she reported, sententious. The artist cocked her head, squinted malevolently at her drawing, dipped, and busily scratched once more. "Scared me," she explained: "coming home so early!" Sally removed her collar with a wrench and a grunt: "Got a date?" "Sure; with Sammy--four o'clock." "Salamander stuff, eh?" "What do you want--a day like this? I'm half-cooked already, and I guess I can go through a little fire for the sake of a sixty-cent _table d' hôte_ and a trip to Coney. But you needn't worry; it'll be hotter than this before Sammy warms up enough to singe anything. His intentions are so praiseworthy they pain him; he blushes every time he has to recognise the sex question long enough to discuss the delights of monogamy in a two-family house within commuting distance of Prospect Park South." "You don't mean to say you've got that far along--already!" "That's the reward of a year's steady angling, honey." "Heavens, but how you must carry on with Sammy!" "Believe me, it's something scandalous," sighed Lucy Spode. "But why--" Sally began in a tone of expostulation.