Convulsively Zillah Forsyth began to rock herself to and fro. "Oh Lordy!" she chuckled. "Oh Lordy, Lordy! Why I've been engaged four times just this past year!" In a sudden passion of fastidiousness she bent down over the particular photograph in her hand and snatching at a handkerchief began to rub diligently at a small smouch of dust in one corner of the cardboard. Something in the effort of rubbing seemed to jerk her small round chin into almost angular prominence. "And before I'm through," she added, at least two notes below her usual alto tones, "And before I'm through--I'm going to get engaged to--every profession that there is on the surface of the globe!" Quite helplessly the thin paper skin of the photograph peeled off in company with the smouch of dust. "And when I marry," she ejaculated fiercely, "and when I marry--I'm going to marry a man who will take me to every place that there is--on the surface of the globe! And after that--!" "After what?" interrogated a brand new voice from the doorway. CHAPTER II It was the other room-mate this time. The only real aristocrat in the whole graduating class, high-browed, high-cheekboned,--eyes like some far-sighted young prophet,--mouth even yet faintly arrogant with the ineradicable consciousness of caste,--a plain, eager, stripped-for-a-long-journey type of face,--this was Helene Churchill. There was certainly no innocuous bloom of country hills and pastures in this girl's face, nor any seething small-town passion pounding indiscriminately at all the doors of experience. The men and women who had bred Helene Churchill had been the breeders also of brick and granite cities since the world was new. Like one infinitely more accustomed to treading on Persian carpets than on painted floors she came forward into the room. "Hello, children!" she said casually, and began at once without further parleying to take down the motto that graced her own bureau-top. It was the era when almost everybody in the world had a motto over his bureau. Helene Churchill's motto was: _Inasmuch As Ye Have Done It Unto One Of The Least Of These Ye Have Done It Unto Me_. On a scroll of almost priceless parchment the text was illuminated with inimitable Florentine skill and color. A little carelessly, after the manner of people quite accustomed to priceless things, she proceeded now to roll the parchment into its smallest possible circumference, humming exclusively to herself all the while an intricate little air from an Italian opera. So the three faces foiled each other, sober city girl, pert town girl, bucolic country girl,--a hundred fundamental differences rampant between them, yet each fervid, adolescent young mouth tamed to the same monotonous, drolly exaggerated expression of complacency that characterizes the faces of all people who, in a distinctive uniform, for a reasonably satisfactory living wage, make an actual profession of righteous deeds.