"She'll never learn anything from those fool articles," answered he. "You ought to hear the people who get them up laughing about them. I see now why they are printed. It's good for circulation, catches the women--even women like you." However, she persisted in reading. But never did she find an article that contained a really practical suggestion--that is, one applying to the case of a woman who had to live on what she made at the start, who was without experience and without a family to help her. All around her had been women who were making their way; but few indeed of them--even of those regarded as successful--were getting along without outside aid of some kind. So when she read or thought or inquired about work for women, she was sometimes amused and oftener made unhappy by the truth as to the conditions, that when a common worker rises it is almost always by the helping hand of a man, and rarely indeed a generous hand--a painful and shameful truth which a society resolved at any cost to think well of itself fiercely conceals from itself and hypocritically lies about. She felt now that there was hope in only one direction--hope of occupation that would enable her to live in physical, moral and mental decency. She must find some employment where she could as decently as might be realize upon her physical assets. The stage would be best--but the stage was impossible, at least for the time. Later on she would try for it; there was in her mind not a doubt of that, for unsuspected of any who knew her there lay, beneath her sweet and gentle exterior, beneath her appearance of having been created especially for love and laughter and sympathy, tenacity of purpose and daring of ambition that were--rarely--hinted at the surface in her moments of abstraction. However, just now the stage was impossible. Spenser would find her immediately. She must go into another part of town, must work at something that touched his life at no point. She had often been told that her figure would be one of her chief assets as a player. And ready-made clothes fitted her with very slight alterations--showing that she had a model figure. The advertisements she had cut out were for cloak models. Within an hour after she left Forty-fourth Street, she found at Jeffries and Jonas, in Broadway a few doors below Houston, a vacancy that had not yet been filled--though as a rule all the help needed was got from the throng of applicants waiting when the store opened. "Come up to my office," said Jeffries, who happened to be near the door as she entered. "We'll see how you shape up. We want something extra--something dainty and catchy."