"It's cold today," she remarked, with a winning smile and an air of taking me into her confidence as she had done with the waiter. "A bit chilly, yes." "He don't let me down to dinner till so late," she continued, "sometimes half-past one. You get hungry, and then you get over being hungry, and then you don't want nothing when you do go down. You know?" Yes, I recognized the experience. "The office where I used to work, we went out to dinner right at twelve every day." "What keeps you so late now?" "I guess he just forgets to let me down. He forgets to go out himself, I think." The waiter brought the soup, a watery looking fluid in which floated a tomato and an onion in partial dissolution. He placed beside the plate a dingy blue check which bore in large print 10c. "When I'm there a month, I'm going to ask him to let me down every day at a regular hour," she went on. "I'm only there a week now, so I wouldn't ask him yet." She tasted the soup, but it was apparently not to her liking, or else, as she had said, her appetite had gone when the first feeling of hunger had passed. She glanced at the dirty blue check which committed her to her choice for better or worse, and then tried another spoonful of soup. "I used to take a cup of coffee and a Charlotte 'roosh' every day, but my mother said I'd starve. She told me I'd got to have soup, it was more stren'thening." "She was quite right, of course." "But what's the use of ordering it if you can't eat it after all?" She regarded the plate disconsolately. A little rallying induced her to make another effort. Then she gave it up entirely. "I wonder what my mother would say if she could see me now!" "I wonder!" Taking two nickels from her small rusty bag, she rose, leaving the plate of cold soup almost untouched. She said good-by with her peculiarly friendly little smile, deposited the blue check and the two nickels at the cash counter, and went back to her afternoon's work. WILLIAM, A MODERN DRAMA[3] [3] Drawn from the records of the Juvenile Protective Association, Chicago. The curtain is about to fall upon a human drama as full of complicating agencies and dramatic ironies as the most exacting either of Greeks or of moderns could require. The dramatis personae are: a colored youth of twenty-two years; his aged mother (the father disappeared while the youth was still a child in Kansas); a friend who failed him and then too late repented; a partner; a dishonest clerk; a lawyer of similar type; and a judge according to the letter of the law. The acts are only three and brief.