"Laura!" she exclaimed. "Why, I haven't seen her for months--only once since she went to Denver and fell in love with a newspaper man. Wasn't that perfectly crazy? I was always afraid she would do something of the sort. There is a sentimental streak in her, you know. I did all I could to dissuade her, but it was no use. She had made up her mind to be good, and that was the end of it. Such a pity! She was getting on so fine. You know, of course, that she has cut out Brockton, and the rest of the crowd. I've quite lost sight of her. Where did you see her?" The agent's thin lips then tightened into a grim smile. "You'd hardly know her now," he said. The girl looked inquiringly at him. "Not know her--why?" Hesitatingly he went on: "Wal--you know how it is when things don't seem to go just right. Laura never was over strong with the managers unless she had a good pull, and now she's shifting for herself, they've gone back on her. She got a fairly good part at the beginning of the season, but she didn't make good. The critics hit her pretty hard, and the manager gave her two weeks' notice. Since then she's been playing such parts as she can get, but I guess she ain't averaged fifteen dollars a week the whole blessed winter." "Where is she now?" "At Mrs. Farley's. She has a small room there. I think she pays four dollars a week--when she pays it. You know Mrs. Farley's. I'm stopping there, too. It ain't exactly swell, but it's better than the park, especially on cold nights." Elfie turned pale under her cosmetics. Too well she knew the horrors of poverty. She was shocked to hear that one of her own sisterhood should be reduced to such straits as these. The lightning had struck uncomfortably near home. Besides she had always been fond of Laura. Yes, she knew Mrs. Farley's, a shrewish Irishwoman, who kept a cheap theatrical boarding house in Forty ----th Street. Ten years ago, in the days when she was a stage beginner, struggling to make both ends meet, she had lived there and as she looked back on those days of self denial and humiliation she shuddered. "I'm awfully sorry," she said, her voice trembling from unaffected emotion. "Tell Laura you met me and say I had no idea of it. Tell her I'll come and see her the very first opportunity. Goodbye." A smile and a nod, and she disappeared, swallowed up in the vortex of humanity that swirls in eddies along the Great White Way. The agent stood looking after her. With a sagacious shake of his head, he murmured to himself: "I don't know but that she's the wise one, after all. What's the good of being decent? The world respects the man who can wear fine duds. Nobody asks how he got 'em. One's a fool to care. Every one for himself and let the devil take the hindmost."