had passed, showing no hint of excitement except in the restless
little black eyes and in the work-scarred hands that rolled cigarette
after cigarette, each glowing for one brief instant, only to die down
to a blackened ash the next; Emma McChesney, half fascinated, half
distrustful, listening in spite of herself, and trying to still a
small inner voice--a voice that had never advised her ill.

"You know the ups and downs to this game," Ed Meyers was saying. "When
I met you there in the elevator you looked like you'd lost your last
customer. You get pretty disgusted with it all, at times, like the
rest of us."

"At that minute," replied Emma McChesney, "I was so disgusted that if
some one had called me up on the 'phone and said, 'Hullo, Mrs.
McChesney! Will you marry me?' I'd have said: 'Yes. Who is this?'"

"There! That's just it. I don't want to be impolite, or anything like
that, Mrs. McChesney, but you're no kid. Not that you look your age--
not by ten years! But I happen to know you're teetering somewhere
between thirty-six and the next top. Ain't that right?"

"Is that a argument to put to a lady?" remonstrated Abel Fromkin.

Fat Ed Meyers waved the interruption away with a gesture of his
strangely slim hands. "This ain't an argument. It's facts. Another ten
years on the road, and where'll you be? In the discard. A man of
forty-six can keep step with the youngsters, even if it does make him
puff a bit. But a woman of forty-six--the road isn't the place for
her. She's tired. Tired in the morning; tired at night. She wants her
kimono and her afternoon snooze. You've seen some of those old girls