Louie mended the fire and got Kitty's supper. When Kitty had finished she cleared the little round table again, and by the time Kitty had put on a pair of red bedroom slippers and turned up her skirt to the blaze she deigned to relent a little. She admitted that it wasn't as if Louie had known she was waiting in the street, but all the same it was annoying. "And now I've got a piece of news for you," she said, warming her hands. "It's a dead secret, but I don't suppose Miriam would mind my telling you. She's in for no end of a good job in a few weeks! But she always gets good jobs. She has determination, Miriam has, you see." Louie was standing by the end of the mantelpiece, stirring a cup of cocoa. She only said "Oh?" Her own lack of determination was now an old reproach. "Ra-_ther_! Have you heard me speak of a Mr. Pepper ever? But no, you won't have; you're always a bit sniffy about Miriam, you see, and that doesn't encourage people to talk. Well, she's his confidential clerk at the Freight and Ballast Company, but he's chucking that, and who do you think with?--James Jeffries!" She paused to see the effect on Louie, and then continued. "Yes, James Jeffries! What do you think of _that_? They're going to start on their own, in no end of a swell way, and Miriam's going over with them. It's Mr. Pepper's doing, of course, and as Mr. Pepper isn't exactly a nobody even where he is, you may bet your boots he won't change for the worse! Oh, James Jeffries knows the kind of person to hang on to! He's to be a partner, if you please, as good as Mr. Pepper himself; how's that for greasing in? Friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, I _don't_ think!" Kitty had this way now of speaking of her former _fiancé_. Sometimes she so extended his name that it became "Mister James Herbert Jeffries." And however Jim now "got on," his advancement would still be, to Kitty, a magnification of her own superiority in those days when she had had a pound a week and he nothing. She began to take out hairpins and went on. "Oh dear, I wish my brushes were here!" (Louie fetched them.) "What was I saying? Oh yes, about Miriam. She's to have an office to herself, perhaps, or at any rate she's not going to sit with the other girls; and when I tell you it's in Pall Mall, you can judge for yourself--not just a couple of offices rented, but a whole building--what ho! The stone that the builders rejected if you like! And she'll have her own extending-bracket telephone, the very latest, and arms to her chair to put her elbows on, not like the typists! And Mr. Pepper's most friendly with her--she takes down his conversations with no end of swells! And I say, Evie Jeffries won't be half set up over it all, oh no! Even _his_ office--James Herbert's, Miriam says--is going to be perfectly scrumptious!"