Rose couldn’t enlighten her.  She’d forgotten their names.

“I’ve had work offered to me,” she went on, “or at least suggested.  Mr. Culver at the hotel told me of a moving-picture place ...”

“Where you could sit in that glass cage of Al Zeider’s and sell tickets?” Miss Gibbons broke in.  “Why didn’t you take it?”

“I told Mr. Culver,” said Rose, “that I’d already walked the length of Main Street and back, and that was enough for me.”

“How did John Culver happen to say anything about that?  How come it you were talking to him?”

“I’d asked him to hire me as a waitress,” said Rose.

“And I reckon,” said Miss Gibbons, “that he told you he kept a respectable hotel.  He may have put some frills on it, but that’s close enough to go on, isn’t it?”

Rose nodded.  In her relief at finding her situation so well understood, she was turning a little limp.

“Why did you come to me?” Miss Gibbons demanded.  “He never would have thought of sending you here.”

Rose braced up once more and told about her conversation with Judge Granger.

This time the milliner heard her through.

“And so the judge sent you to me,” she said, when Rose had finished.  “I suppose that was his fool idea of being funny.  He thought it was a chance to get me poison mad.”

Rose nodded a little wearily.

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose that was it.”

The milliner shot out a sharp glance at her.  “Sit down,” she said bruskly, and nodded to a chair.

Rose didn’t much want to.  Her instinct was to stay on her feet until she’d won her battle, and her fatigue only heightened it.  But Miss Gibbons had given her an order rather than an invitation, and she obeyed it.

The older woman didn’t sit down.

“Harvey Granger,” she said thoughtfully, “will never forgive me as long as he lives, for not thinking he’s a great man.  That’s just ridiculous, of course, because I know Harve.  Years ago, you see,—­so long ago that everybody’s forgotten it—­my father was the big man down in this part of the state.  He was a circuit judge, when circuit judges amounted to something, and he was one of the best of them.  But he was a fool about money and he got mixed up in things—­and died.  I was twenty-five years old then, and I took to hats.

“Well, Harve Granger was my father’s law-clerk before father was elected judge.  I used to see him night and morning.  And, as I say, I know him all the way through.  He knows I know him, and that’s what he can’t get over.”

There was a little silence when she finished; a silence Rose’s instinct told her not to break.  Presently the little woman wheeled around on her.

“Well,” she said, “you came to me anyway, though you saw the judge meant it for a joke.  Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” said Rose.  “I thought I would.”

“And you haven’t told me yet,” said Miss Gibbons, “that you’re really straight and respectable.  What have you got to say about that?”