“I’ll help you red up, my dear,” she whispered.  Forthwith, they fell to sweeping, dusting, shaking sheets.

As she moved about the squeezed little furnished rooms and alcove, which formed her residence and professional offices in these reduced days, Rosalie Le Grange appeared the one thing within its walls which was not common and dingy.  A pink wrapper, morning costume of her craft, enclosed a figure grown thick with forty-five, but marvelously well-shaped and controlled.  Her wrapper was as neat as her figure; even the lace at the throat was clean.  Her long, fair hands, on which the first approach of age appeared as dimples, not as wrinkles or corrugations of the flesh, ran to nails whose polish proved daily care.  Her hair, chestnut in the beginning, foamed with white threads.  Below was a face which hardly needed, as yet, the morning dab of powder, so craftily had middle age faded the skin without deadening it.  Except for a pair of large, gray, long-lashed eyes—­too crafty in their corner glances, too far looking in their direct vision—­that skin bounded and enclosed nothing which was not attractive and engaging.  Her chin was piquantly pointed.  Beside a tender, humorous, mobile mouth played two dimples, which appeared and disappeared as she moved about the room delivering monologue to Hattie.

“I see a dark gentleman that ain’t in your life yet.  He’s behind a counter now, I think.  He ain’t the one that the ace of hearts shows is goin’ to call.  I see you all whirled about between ’em, but I sense nothin’ about how it’s goin’ to turn out—­land sakes, child, don’t you ever dust behind the pictures?  You’ll have to be neater if you expect to make a good wife to the dark gentleman—­”

“Will it be him?” asked Hattie, stopping with a sheet in her hands.

“Now the spirits slipped that right out of me, didn’t they?” pursued Rosalie.  “Land sakes, you can’t keep ’em back when they want to talk.  Now you just hold that and think over it, dearie.  No more for you to-day.”  Rosalie busied herself with pinning the faded, dusty pink ribbon to a gilded rolling pin, and turned her monologue upon herself: 

“I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against this house for the price, dearie, but my, this is a comedown.  The last time I done straight clairvoyant work, it was in a family hotel with three rooms and a bath and breakfast in bed.  Well, there’s ups an’ downs in this business.  I’ve been down before and up again—­”

Hattie, her mouth relieved of a pillowcase, spoke boldly the question in her mind.

“What put you down?”

Rosalie, her head on one side, considered the arrangement of the pink ribbon, before she answered: 

“Jealousy, dearie; perfessional jealousy.  The Vango trumpet seances were doin’ too well to suit that lyin’, fakin’, Spirit Truth outfit in Brooklyn—­wasn’t that the bell?”

It was.  Hattie patted the pillow into place, and sped for the door.