"This is a friend of mine--John Madison--Miss Elfie St. Clair." Jocularly he added: "Well known on the metropolitan stage." Madison smiled and nodded. The girl eyed him with interest. He was a type of man not often seen in the gay resorts of Manhattan. Impulsively she burst out: "Say, Glenn--your friend's a good looker, do you know it? Better take care, or he'll cut you out with the girls." Turning to Madison, she demanded: "From the West?" He nodded. "Yes--Denver." "Seeing New York, eh? Great fun, ain't it?" He shrugged his massive shoulders and made no reply, finding more amusement in watching the crowd than in gratifying the curiosity of this chatterbox. She turned to Warner. "Got a grouch, ain't he?" Warner laughed. "Oh--that's his manner. Don't mind him." Turning the conversation, he demanded: "What's new?" The girl glanced all around the restaurant, as she answered: "Oh, the same old thing! In feather one week--broke the next. You know how it is." "I thought you were playing." "So I was, but the show busted. It was a bully part, and I spent $150 on dresses. All I got was two weeks' salary. When the dresses will be paid for, the Lord only knows." Elfie St. Clair was a typical Tenderloin grafter. A woman absolutely devoid of moral conscience, she styled herself an actress, yet was one only by courtesy. By dint of pulling all kinds of wires she contrived from time to time to get a part to play, but her stage activities were really only a blind to conceal her true vocation. A cold-blooded courtesan of the most brazen and unscrupulous type, she was, notwithstanding, one of the most popular women in the upper Tenderloin. She dressed with more taste than most women of her class, and her naturally happy disposition, her robust spirits and spontaneous gaiety had won her many friends. For all that she was an unscrupulous grafter, the kind of woman who deliberately sets out to lure men to destruction. She knew she was bad, yet found plenty of excuses for herself. She often declared that she hated and despised men for the wrong they had done her. Imposed upon, deceived, mistreated in her early girlhood by the type of men who prey on women, at last she turned the tables, and armed only with her dangerous charm and beauty, started out to make the same slaughter of the other sex as she herself had suffered, together with many of her sisters.