“You spoke the truth. How are you, Billy? You look decidedly better. Gavan, my hands are full for the next hour or so and I can’t even offer to take you with me, for I’m going to sick people. But I shall be back and through with all my work by tea-time, if you don’t mind going to my place and waiting. You’ll find Maude Allen there. She lives down here, and with me when I am here. She is a nice girl, though she will talk your head off.” “How do I find her? I don’t mind waiting.” “You follow this to the end, take the first turning to the right, and that will bring you to my place. I’ll meet you there at five.” Gavan, thus directed, made his way to the dingy little house occupied by the group of energetic women whom Eppie joined yearly for her three months of--dissipation? he asked himself, amused by her variegated vigor. The dingy little house looked on a dingy little square--shell of former respectable affluence from which the higher form of life had shriveled. The sooty trees were thickly powdered with young green, and uneven patches of rough, unkempt grass showed behind broken iron railings. A cat’s-meat man called his dangling wares along the street, and Gavan, noticing a thin and furtive cat, that stole from a window-ledge, stopped him and bought a large three-penny-worth, upon which he left the cat regaling itself with an odd, fastidious ferocity. He entered another world when he entered Eppie’s sitting-room. Here was life at its most austerely sweet. Books lined the walls, bowls of primroses and delicate Japanese bronzes set above their shelves; chintz-covered chairs were drawn before the fire; the latest reviews lay on a table, and on the piano stood open music; there were wide windows in the little room, and crocuses, growing in flat, earthenware dishes, blew out their narrow chalices against the sunlit muslin curtains. Miss Allen sat sewing near the crocuses, and, shy and voluble, rose to greet him. She was evidently accustomed to Eppie’s guests--accustomed, too, perhaps, to taking them off her hands, for though she was shy her volubility showed a familiarity with the situation. She was almost as funny a contrast to Eppie as the slum children had been an ugly one. She wore a spare, drab-colored skirt and a cotton shirt, its high, hard collar girt about by a red tie that revealed bone buttons before and behind. Her sleek, fair hair, relentlessly drawn back, looked like a varnish laid upon her head. Her features, at once acute and kindly, were sharp and pink. She was sewing on solid and distressingly ugly materials.