Mrs. Paynter listened with some interest.  If humor is a defect, as they tell us nowadays, she was almost a faultless woman.  And in her day she had been a beauty and a toast.  You hear it said generously of a thousand, but it happened to be true in her case.  The high-bred regularity of feature still survived, but she had let herself go in latter years, as most women will who have other things than themselves to think about, and hard things at that.  Her old black dress was carelessly put on; she could look at herself in the mirror by merely leaning forward an inch or two, and it never occurred to her to do it—­an uncanny thing in a woman.

“I’m sure it sounds quite like him,” said Mrs. Paynter, when her niece had finished.  “And so Gardiner West walked around with you.  I hope, my dear, you asked him in to supper?  We have an exceptionally nice Porterhouse steak to-night.  But I suppose he would scorn—­”

The girl interrupted her, abolishing and demolishing such a thought.  Mr. West would have been only too pleased, she said, but she positively would not ask him, because of the serious work that was afoot that night.

“The pleasure I’ve so far given your little man,” laughed she, patting her aunt’s cheeks with her two hands, “has been negligible—­I have his word for that—­and to-night it is going to be the same, only more so.”

Sharlee arose, took off her coat and furs, laid them on the bed, and going to the bureau began fixing her hair in the back before the long mirror.  No matter how well a woman looks to the untrained, or man’s, eye, she can always put in some time pleasurably fixing her hair in the back.

“Now,” said Sharlee, “to business.  Tell me all about the little dead-beat.”

“It is four weeks next Monday,” said Mrs. Paynter, putting a shoe-horn in her novel to mark the place, “since the young man came to me.  He was from New York, and just off the train.  He said that he had been recommended to my house, but would not say by whom, nor could he give references.  I did not insist on them, for I can’t be too strict, Sharlee, with all the other boarding-places there are and that room standing empty for two months hand-running, and then for three months before that, before Miss Catlett, I mean.  The fact is, that I ought to be over on the Avenue, where I could have only the best people.  It would be infinitely more lucrative—­why, my dear, you should hear Amy Marsden talk of her enormous profits!  And Amy, while a dear, sweet little woman, is not clever!  I remember as girls—­but to go back even of that to the very heart of the matter, who ever heard of a clever Wilkerson?  For she, you know, was born ...”

“Never you mind Mrs. Marsden, Aunt Jennie,” said the girl, gently drawing her back to the muttons,—­“we’ll make lots more money than she some day.  So you gave him the room, then?”