"That's nothing," she asserted wanly. "I am so tired that I would like to build me a pink-wadded silk house, just the shape of a slipper, where I could snuggle down in the toe and go to sleep for a--million years. It isn't to-morrow's early morning that racks me, it's the thought of all the early mornings between now and the Judgment Day. Oh, any sentimental person can cry at night, but when you begin to cry in the morning--to lie awake and cry in the morning--" Her face sickened suddenly. "Did you see that Mother downstairs?" she gasped, "fixing that curl? Think of having a Mother!" Then Noreen Gaudette opened her great gray eyes and grinned diabolically. She had a funny little manner of cartooning her emotions. "Think of having a Mother?" she scoffed. "What nonsense!--_Think of having a c-u-r-l!_ "You talk like Sunday-Paper débutantes," she drawled. "You don't know anything about being tired. Why, I am so tired--I am so tired--that I wish--I wish that the first man who ever proposed to me would come back and ask me--_again_!" It was then that the Landlady, knocking at the door, presented a card, "Mr. Ernest T. Dextwood," for Miss Gaudette, and the innocent-looking conversation exploded suddenly like a short-fused firecracker. Rhoda in an instant was sitting bolt upright with her arms around her knees rocking to and fro in convulsive delight. Ruth much more thoughtfully jumped for Noreen's bureau drawer. But Noreen herself, after one long, hyphenated "Oh, my _H-e-a-v-e-n-s_!" threw off her damp, wrinkled coat, stalked over to the open window, and knelt down quiveringly where she could smother her blazing face in the inconsequent darkness. For miles and miles the teasing lights of Other Women's homes stretched out before her. From the window-sill below her rose the persistent purple smell of violets, and the cooing, gauzy laughter of the Much-Loved Girl. Fatigue was in the damp air, surely, but Spring was also there, and Lonesomeness, and worst of all, that desolating sense of patient, dying snow wasting away before one's eyes like Life itself. When Noreen turned again to her friends her eyelids drooped defiantly across her eyes. Her lips were like a scarlet petal under the bite of her teeth. There in the jetty black and scathing white of her dress she loomed up suddenly like one of her own best drawings--pulseless ink and stale white paper vitalized all in an instant by some miraculous emotional power. A living Cartoon of "_Fatigue_" she stood there--"_Fatigue_," as she herself would have drawn it--no flaccid failure of wilted bone and sagging flesh, but _Verve_--the taut Brain's pitiless rally of the Body that can not afford to rest--the verve of Factory Lights blazing overtime, the verve of the Runner who drops at his goal.