When that injudicious grasping of the third-rail had snuffed out the low, but stubborn, flame that a foreman had known as "Number 12," and a few score of human beings had called Michael Flanagan, his wife, Bridget, had looked up from her washtub long enough to refuse the offer of a hundred dollars, made by the company's claim-adjuster as full payment for whatever inconvenience she might have been occasioned by her husband's demise. One of those very modern young lawyers, whose livelihood depends upon their study of the newspapers, and the speed of their feet, had arrived at the Flanagan tenement ahead of the adjuster. He had accepted a contingent fee of ten dollars, and thereafter, being defeated by the company's expert attorneys in a lower court, refused, as usual, to appeal unless the widow handed him a further amount of money that was wholly beyond her reach. So Irish-eyed Katie was put to work, as she should in any case have been put, and Mrs. Flanagan went on with her washing. The girl's first position was in a second-hand clothing shop on Sixth Avenue, where she went to work at eight in the morning and quit at half-past ten at night. The stock-in-trade of this place was largely revived ball-gowns and opera cloaks, bought, for the most part, from women of so much means as to pretend, at least, that they never wore the same gown twice, and yet of too much thrift to give their discarded clothes to charity. Its patrons were persons that the original wearers of the gowns would have blushed to meet. And its proprietress was a little lynx-eyed, hook-nosed person whose sole object in life was to induce the former class to sell for less than they had intended and to persuade the latter class to buy for more than they could afford. The virtue of this method she impressed, by precept and example, upon her six girl-clerks, and she raised their profits as they raised their prices of sale. She told, with a fine pride, how she had once so conducted a negotiation that a Riverside Drive husband had paid her nearly as much for a dress that he was buying for a Forty-seventh Street acquaintance as he had first paid for the same dress when it was made for his wife. But, commissions to the contrary notwithstanding, neither Katie nor her companions could earn anything beyond a bare living wage. The lure of clothes was always before them; their work was the handling and the praising of beautiful fabrics beautifully arranged. They were told that they might themselves buy of these at what the proprietress called a mere nothing above the cost price, but what was really a considerable increase over it; they wanted to look their best among their friends, and their employer insisted that they look their best to her patrons; there was not one of the half-dozen clerks that was not continually from fifteen to a hundred dollars in her mistress's debt.