"But this is your evening for the Y. W. C. A.," Hertha answered. The smile left Kathleen's face. "I'm through there," she said. "It's not for me." Hertha wanted to know more, but she was reticent with questions. As it happens, however, the silent person learns more of another's life than one who shows a voluble sympathy, and Kathleen was soon telling her friend that all girls' clubs and Christian Associations were nothing but charities; that she could have nothing to do with a charity herself, and that, had it not been for a moment's temptation, offered by a friend, she would never have entered the class. It was the exercise that she needed and the marching to music had been the best part. "And it's grand," she explained, "if only for an hour a week to be living as the Lord intended you with your legs apart." But this morning she had been giving massage to a rich uptown customer. "And after I had pommeled off the two pounds she'd gained at a twelve-course dinner the night before, she begins to tell me of her charities. 'I like best to help the working girl,' she says, 'and I gave my mite to their new building, but I'm troubled at the obstinacy of the young women in refusing to become servants. They have a false pride in the matter.' I kept my mouth shut, for I couldn't afford to lose a good customer, but I was that mad to think I might have been taking money off her as a gift that I stopped in at the office and told Miss Jones I should quit. 'Is that so, Kathleen?' she says quietly. 'It is for you to decide.' And then she asks: 'And how is Miss Ogilvie?' She always calls me Kathleen. Not that I mind it, but I'm fifteen years older than you, and Miss Jones needn't 'Miss Ogilvie' you to me. I don't wonder she does, though, for you wear your clothes as though you had always lived in a palace, and you speak like a princess." "Don't be foolish," Hertha said, and then laughed--an odd, short laugh in which Kathleen joined, though as it happened she did not understand the joke. "Let's have the stew, only don't put quite so much onion in it, and we'll get the ice cream on the way home." The stew was delicious and Hertha enjoyed it, while Kathleen consoled herself for the loss of the extra onion by a plentiful use of condiments. "I've just a good plain appetite," she explained. Then they went out into the noisy street to the theater where they sat in the orchestra and Hertha felt like a queen. In the South she had been only a few times to some cheap playhouse where she had been repelled by the vulgarity of the people and the performance; but here in New York the comfortable theater, darkened now, the music, the quiet audience, filled her with happy anticipation. She squeezed Kathleen's hand as the picture of a lovely young girl in gingham dress and pink sunbonnet flashed upon the screen, and the story began.