Amy was keenly sympathetic and pored over the eye-straining advertisement columns as persistently as Jean herself. "How's this?" she inquired, glancing up hopefully from one of these quests. "'Wanted: Girl or woman to interest herself in caring for the feeble-minded.'" "I tried that yesterday." "No good?" "They only offered a home." "And with idiots! They must be dotty themselves." Then Jean, ranging another column, thought that she detected a glimmer of hope. "Listen," she said. "'Wanted: Girl to pose for society illustrations.' Do you think there is anything in this?" "Too much," returned Amy, sententiously. "Don't answer model ads. It isn't models those fellows want any more than they are artists. Real artists don't need to advertise. They can get all the models they want without it. I never thought to mention posing. Why don't you try it? You have got the looks, and it's perfectly respectable." "Is it?" rejoined Jean, dubiously. "I thought this advertisement sounded all right because it says 'society illustrations.'" "It's just as proper to pose nude, if that's what you're thinking about. I know the nicest kind of a girl who does. Her mother is paralyzed. But that's only one branch of the business, and it's all respectable. Why, you'll find art students themselves doing it to help along with their expenses. I know what I'm talking about, because I've posed." "You!" "Just a little. It was for an artist who boarded here a while before you came. He moved uptown when he began to get on, and now you see his pictures in all the magazines. I was a senator's daughter in one set of drawings and a golf-girl in a poster. It's easy work as soon as your muscles get broken in, and it stands you in fifty cents an hour at least. The girl I told you of sometimes makes twenty-five or thirty dollars a week, but she poses for life classes; they're in the schools, you know. I made up my mind to go into it once." "Why didn't you?" Amy laid a derisive finger on her tip-tilted nose. "Here's why," she laughed. "It was this way: The artist who used to board here told me of another man who paid three or four models regular salaries. He did pictures about Greeks and Romans, and all those girls had to do, I heard, was to loaf round in pretty clothes, and once in awhile be painted. I went up there one day and it certainly was a lovely place, just like a house in a novel I'd read called 'The Last Days of Pompey-eye.' A girl was posing when I came, and, if you'll believe me, that man had rigged up a wind-machine that blew her clothes about just as though she was running a race. Well, I didn't stay long. The artist--he was seventy-five or eighty, I should say, and grumpy--turned me sideways, took one look at my nose, and said I was too old, nineteen hundred years too old! He thought he was funny. Somebody told me afterward that he was a has-been and couldn't sell his pictures any more."