"You girls!" he laughed, in palpable deception. "You all think I've got a lot of money. Why, there ain't no use thinkin' you can bleed me. I'm a business man, an' I do everything on a straight business basis, but I wouldn't rent a flat for the finest of you that ever walked Fourteenth Street." Violet's answer was brief. That she should have given her confidence to such a beast, that such a beast should continue to thrive in the world that was closed to her, and that, her pitiable confidence once given, she should be so grossly misinterpreted--these things sent a red rage rushing to her now always incarnadined cheeks. She gave the shopkeeper a push that nearly sent him rolling to the foot of the stairs. "Get away from me!" she whispered hoarsely. "Get away! I wouldn't have you for a gift!" The man stumbled and gripped the rose-colored lamp upon the newel-post, which swayed, under his rocking weight, like a palm-tree in a storm. He gasped for breath, got it, and, shaking his fist upward through the shadows, began to bellow forth a storm of oaths that, for foulness, utterly outdid the ejaculations to which, from both sexes, Violet was already becoming accustomed. "You come down here," he courageously shouted, "and I'll give you the worst beating you ever had in your life! Nice place, this is! I'll have it pinched--you see if I don't! You can't make an easy thing out o' me! You've robbed me, anyhow. You'll get what's comin' to you!"--And he ended with the single epithet to which those four walls were unaccustomed. Rose ran out from the parlor. "Shut up, you!" she commanded of the disturber, in a low tone that nevertheless compelled obedience. "What's the trouble, Violet?" Violet leaned against the stair-wall, half-way up, her burning hands pressed to her burning face. She was mad with anger and shame, but she was also afraid. "You heard him," she gasped. "Yes," snapped the visitor, his voice uncontrollably resuming its former timbre, "and you heard me, too!" The mistress is, of necessity, always, in a crisis, against the slave. "Well," said Rose, "tell me what she done." Violet, however, saw at once the necessity of changing the issue. "He says he's been robbed!" she called down the stairs. And then she ran after her words, and stood under the lamp, facing them both, her arms extended, the flowing sleeves trembling with the emotion that they covered but could not conceal. "Search me!" she commanded. "If you think I took a cent of yours, search me!" She was a vision that brought conviction with it. Before the sputtering visitor could correct the situation, Rose had, perhaps against her will, been converted. She took the man's hat from the hall-rack at her side, put it on his head, opened the street-door, and gently propelled him through it. "You're drunk," she said, "an' you'd better get out before I call the cop. There ain't no badger business in this house, an' don't you forget it!"