An overpowering anger came swelling in the latter's veins. She walked back to the door and stood before the placid bovine figure of her room-mate. For a moment she could not trust herself to speak, she was trembling so. "I said for him to wait outside--there," she repeated with quavering emphasis. Maida's face looked flat and large and sober. There was a great, vast, pasty blank of cheek from her sombre eyes to the downcast corner of her mouth. "I heard you," she replied. "Come in, Tim." Mary Louise felt impotent. She watched the face before her, stolid, immutable, expressionless. She felt suffocated for breath. She plucked at her skirts with her fingers. Finally she gasped out: "Not--not into my room. If he does, I'm through with it--and you. You understand?" Maida shrugged her shoulders, and a slight smile curled the corners of her lips. She turned away. "That's your lookout, not mine. You're making an awful fool of yourself, McCallum." And then she closed the door. Mary Louise walked blindly down the hall. She stumbled into the elevator and did not answer when the elevator boy spoke to her. When she gained the street the rush of the night air against her face steadied her a bit. She turned off promptly north and struck out for the down-town district. By the time she had walked a block her faculties were returning. It had all been preposterous, crude. She had blindly lost her temper. Something kept crying out to her that she was an old maid. Perhaps she shouldn't have minded. She was finicky and squeamish. A girl had to have some privacy in the place she entertained her company. But Maida--and the cook! The thought of that flat, pasty, sullen face stirred in her a sudden repulsion. She crossed Broadway and turned west toward Fourth, walking rapidly. Maida! Maida! The girl she had known for eighteen months in the Red Cross tea room! The girl who had sat through a year of war without ever changing the vacuity of her smile! Sat--that was it, positively sat. A woman with a figure like that had no right to a lover. And a cook! An ordinary cook, hired out by the week! His beady, close-set eyes and hair sleeked back. Like a rat! And _she_ was mixed directly up in it, _she_--Mary Louise McCallum, the daughter of Angus McCallum. She shuddered and hurried on. As she passed Chestnut Street they were going into the "movie" theatre. There was a long queue stringing out on the pavement. She was hardly aware of it but kept on walking straight north. More than one head was turned to watch her as she plunged resolutely on. Her apparent fixity of purpose was incongruous for that time of the evening.