"Don't you fool yourself that you'll be better off. Mr. Meyer! Mr. Meyer!" she called, raising her voice as the son of the house made his appearance in a doorway. "Here's another girl what's got the department-store fever." Jean shrank from further explanations, particularly with young Meyer, but he bustled up at once and put the same questions as the forewoman. "Which store is it?" he continued. She told him, and wondered why he smirked. "Does Amy Jeffries work there still?" he said. "Yes." "Seems to be prospering? Wears good clothes?" "Yes." Young Meyer leered again. "Come round when you're sick of it," he invited. "Tell Amy, too. You're both good cloak-makers." She turned from his satyr-face, vaguely disquieted. His whole manner was an evil innuendo. The girl with the freckles, who had called the place a sweat-shop, went down with her in the freight-elevator and walked beside her for a block, when they gained the street. "I heard Jake chewin' the rag up there," she said. "Why didn't you cuff his ears? Anybody'd know to look at you that no buyer got you _your_ position." "What are you talking about?" "You didn't catch on to what he was hintin'?" "No." The girl gave an incredulous exclamation. "And maybe you don't know either how Amy Jeffries got her place?" she added. "She said a buyer for the firm saw her at Meyer & Schwarzschild's and liked her looks." "That's straight," grinned the sceptic. Jean shook her impatiently by the arm. "What _isn't_ straight?" she demanded. "You are the one hinting now. What do you mean? Out with it!" But the girl squirmed out of her grasp and darted laughing away. "Ask Amy," she called. XI Jean meant to probe the mystery at the first possible moment, but her resolve weakened in Amy's presence. If the girl's light-heartedness did not of itself quiet suspicion, it at least disarmed it, while her unselfish joy at Jean's release from the thraldom of Meyer & Schwarzschild alone made the questions Jean had thought to put seem churlish and ungrateful. Moreover, Amy was full of a plan for the evening. "I knew it was coming," she exulted. "Anybody with a pair of eyes could see by the way he's picked you out to talk to every night that you've got him going. He came to me first to ask if I thought you'd come, and when I accepted for both, he hustled right out to get the tickets." "What tickets?" She did not ask who was the purchaser; she, too, had eyes. "Tickets for the theatre--a vaudeville show." Jean's face lit. "Vaudeville! I've often wondered what it was like." "You're not telling me you've never seen a vaudeville show?" "Never. Nothing worth seeing ever came to Shawnee Springs. Ought we to go?" "Do you mean, is it respectable? Sure! One of the best in the city." "I don't mean that. Ought we to go in this way? I don't know him."