At eleven-thirty, when Cecille was crying comfortably, she rose. And seeing that her work was well done, she became brisk. "I'll get a bawling out from Fiegenspann," she said, and ran to a window. "Thank God, that taxi's here. And now you'd better get to bed. Maybe hereafter you'll know better than to mix it with somebody outa your class. You oughta known in the first place that perfect ladies have got it all over girls like us, before we start. They've got everything fixed, the judges and the referee, before you step into the ring." She ran out--and flashed back. "Don't get me wrong, Cele." For one reason or another she hurried it. "I ain't got time to explain just what I meant to say, but there's one thing I didn't mean. Don't get me wrong. If you ain't a lady, then I'm the Prince of Wales." That was the second time Cecille heard it. "A girl like us." After a time her sobs subsided until they were no more than long, unsteady breaths. But she stayed at the window, staring down into the street. Once she dug the knuckles of one fist into her eyes and wistfully shook her head. "I wonder," she whispered. "I wonder." CHAPTER V CHAMPION! CHAMPION! Perry Blair, champion lightweight of the world, stood on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, deep in contemplation of a quaint phase of our present-day democracy. It was a fertile spot for such moralizing, albeit somewhat exposed for one attempting philosophy in a fall-weight overcoat. For nowhere in all this world could one hope to come upon a crowd better schooled in the rules of hero-worship, American-style, than this eleventh-hour mob which was pouring like tide-rips from side-street theaters into the city's main thoroughfare. Much has been written, of a distinctly pathetic flavor, concerning the case of a king without a throne. From days immemorial such hapless figures have been somehow invested by historians with a melancholy glamour; and yet this appears to be true only of those royal individuals who came by their thrones in the easiest way--that of inheritance. The kings of high endeavor who have won to the pinnacle by force of their own stoutness of heart--in other words the popular idols of a fickle public, who have scarce begun to get acquainted with the dizzy uncertainty of their pedestals before the pedestal be rudely removed from beneath them--rarely find the world inclined to melancholy interest in their plight. Ridicule is the commonest manifestation of any interest whatsoever, ridicule and an unfathomable contempt.