The other quickened with a flash of temper. "Don't ask me! I came No'th to study art and mingle with the world of intellect and fashion, and after three years I'm drawing heads for fashion magazines at a dollar per, and I know a minor poet who's acquainted with the assistant editor of _The Scrap-Book_, and the one man I know who owns a dress-suit gets fifty cents an hour for posing in it. If that isn't enough to make me welcome even the prospect of married life with Sammy Myerick and a woman to do the washing, I don't know--" "Well, if you aren't crazy about Sammy, why not chuck him? Marriage isn't the last resource for a girl like you. You've got just as many wits to live on as the next one. This town's full of young women no better-looking than either of us, and with even less intelligence, who manage pretty comfortably, thank you, on the living the world owes them." "Sally Manvers!" cried the Southern girl, scandalised, "what a way to talk!" "Oh, _all_ right," said the other indifferently. "Where's Mary Warden?" "Lyric Hall-rehearsing." "Lucky Mary!" Lucy Spode looked up in astonishment. "Lucky!" she protested; "dancing till she's ready to drop, in this awful heat, and no pay for rehearsals!" "All the same," Sally contended, "she's got some chance, some right to hope for better things. She's an understudy, and her principal might fall ill--or something. That's better than marrying a man you don't care for--or clerking at Huckster's for seven dollars a week." "Cat," said Miss Spode dispassionately. "Who's been mussing your fur?" "Life." The steel pen was poised again while Lucy Spode surveyed Sally Manvers suspiciously. "What do you mean--life?" she demanded. "This sort of thing." Sally waved a comprehensive hand. "Living here, in this hole, and most of the time not even able to pay my share of the rent; slaving for a dollar a day, and losing part of that in unjust fines; walking to and from the store to save car fare; eating the sort of food we do eat; never having pretty clothes or pleasures of any sort. I don't call this a life!" "You've got indigestion," Miss Spade diagnosed shrewdly. "I'll bet two bits you've been eating napoleons again." "I have got indigestion, but it's thanks only to being fed up with existence--the kind we lead, at least. I want something better." "The vote, perhaps?" "For two cents I'd throw something at you." The artist uncoiled her legs, stuck the pen in her hair, set the ink-bottle down on the floor, sighed, and, lifting the drawing-board, held it at arm's length, studying her work through narrowed eyelids. "Then it must be a man," she concluded absently. "When a woman of twenty-seven wants something and doesn't know what it is, it's either the vote or a man." "Oh, shut up."