cent tea from a large and heavy mug, Mercedes sipped three-dollar
tea from a tiny cup of Belleek, rose-tinted, fragile as all
egg-shell. In the same manner, his twenty-five cent coffee was
diluted with milk, her eighty cent Turkish with cream.

"'Tis good enough for the old man," she told Saxon. "He knows no
better, and it would be a wicked sin to waste it on him."

Little traffickings began between the two women. After Mercedes
had freely taught Saxon the loose-wristed facility of playing
accompaniments on the ukulele, she proposed an exchange. Her time
was past, she said, for such frivolities, and she offered the
instrument for the breakfast cap of which Saxon had made so good
a success.

"It's worth a few dollars," Mercedes said. "It cost me twenty,
though that was years ago. Yet it is well worth the value of the
cap."

"But wouldn't the cap be frivolous, too?" Saxon queried, though
herself well pleased with the bargain.

"'Tis not for my graying hair," Mercedes frankly disclaimed. "I
shall sell it for the money. Much that I do, when the rheumatism
is not maddening my fingers, I sell. La la, my dear, 'tis not old
Barry's fifty a month that'll satisfy all my expensive tastes.
'Tis I that make up the difference. And old age needs money as
never youth needs it. Some day you will learn for yourself."

"I am well satisfied with the trade," Saxon said. "And I shall