“Oh, and those unusual pale yellow roses—the combination is wonderful, and the scent.” She buried her nose in the flowers in an ecstasy of delight that made her forget that Ruth was paying for them. “Now we’ll ride down on the ’bus,” said Ruth. “But you haven’t told me just where Nels is—is Alice Winn pretty?” Questions of this sort are perfectly intelligible to women and Dorothy answered in her own way as they climbed into the Fifth Avenue ’bus. “He’s gone with her to the Met—to look over some costumes she wants to use in this mural she’s supposed to be doing; and of course she is pretty—an anæmic, horrid, little dark-skinned vamp—and she lisps—all the time except when she forgets it or when there aren’t any men around. It’s not nice for me to talk like this. Probably she’s all right, only she isn’t good for Nels. I know that. What I’m afraid of is that she’ll use him. Lots of girls do, you know, use men like that. She’ll ask his advice about things and before he knows it he’ll be painting her old mural for her and she’ll sign it, and he’ll sit back and let her get the credit for doing it. It’s been done before, you know.” “Nels is too sensible for that. He’ll wake up before it’s gone that far.” “I don’t think so; she _is_ attractive to men.” They fell silent for a short space, looking out at the grey December streets on which no snow had yet fallen. Now a thin, cold rain began falling, making the pavements glisten, and giving even well-dressed pedestrians a shabby appearance as they hurried up and down—a thick stream of holiday shoppers. “My room isn’t much, but at least I live on Washington Square and that is something,” said Dorothy. “I love it all the year round, even now when there aren’t any leaves on the trees or any Italian children playing and when this beastly rain falls. I rather like rain anyway, but I’m awfully glad we’ve got the roses. We’ll get off here and walk around to the ‘delly’ first. It’s on Bleecker Street. I’m not supposed to cook anything in my room, but of course I do. All of us do.” Their purchases, though guided by the practical Dorothy, were rather like a college girl’s spread. Dorothy lived in an old-fashioned white house on the south side of the square—a house in which every piece of decrepit furniture seemed to have been dragged from its individual attic and assembled here in vast inharmony. Yet mingled with the 1830 atrocities were a few “good” things, left from time to time by artists and writers whom prosperity had called to better quarters. Dorothy lived at the top of the house in one of the two rooms facing the square.