"If that’s the way you feel about it, you needn’t ask my advice again. We’re wasting each other’s time." Saying which, Cornelia rose and left the office. *CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX* *I* The Paulette manikins, famed throughout the world of fashion for their grace in attitude and correctness in position and movement, owed their prestige to a system of hygienic training conceived and carried out by Harry Kelly himself. Yet these young ladies took their distinction so seriously that they held it beneath them to assist their chief in straightening out the classroom disorder when the period of instruction was over. "Here’s a mess!" called out Mazie Ross, walking into the Paulette gymnasium, immediately after the dismissal of a small class of manikins. "You might think they’d been on a grand jamboree." "Anything up?" said Harry, shortly. "Janet asked me to help you this morning." "What for?" "She went out for a horseback ride with the St. Hilaires." "This morning. Why, as it is, she goes almost every afternoon. She went yesterday afternoon. A fine way to do business, I’ll say." Mazie sulkily began to pick up stray articles. "You needn’t pitch into me, Harry," she said. "You’re not half so sorry as I am that your gentle Janet isn’t here to do this rotten job. Is it my fault?" "Does Cornelia know she’s away?" said Kelly, fuming. "Can a cat miaow within a mile of these precincts without Corny being on to it?" "Why don’t they keep me posted then? I never hear of a blessed thing that goes on in my own home until it’s all over." "Say, do you want to start a row? Then take a tip from me and land into a certain party in the main office. If you’d knock her down and then jump on her with both feet, you’d be doing something. What’s the use of picking on a dead bird like me?" "Don’t talk that way about Cornelia," said Harry, fumbling amongst the papers on the desk, and trying vainly to be stern. "I’ve told you before I won’t have it. Where’s your gratitude?" She made a face at him behind his back. "Gratitude!" she said. "What’s the good of me wasting gratitude on Cornelia when she reminds herself and everybody in Paulette’s daily that she picked me up out of the gutter that Hutch left me in?" "Lock up the wardrobe and clear out, will you?" said Kelly, frigidly. "I can do the rest myself." "Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry," she muttered to herself. But she stayed and continued to put things to rights. Mazie had changed greatly since the palmy days of the Lorillard tenements. She looked ill and haggard, a mere shadow of the jaunty "Follies" girl of old. Her willowy posture had degenerated into an undisguised slouch, her hair was frowsy, and her dress was slung together. But her tongue had not lost its stab. She closed the wardrobe door with an unintentional slam that caused Harry Kelly to jump up in his seat. "Damn!" he said, in that mild voice of his.