“Buy a hat for your wife.  A waste-paper basket by night and a hat by day.  Genuine ostrich feathers growing on it.  Becoming to all styles of feminine beauty.  What am I bid on this sure tickler of the feminine palate?  Three dollars?  Why, ladies and gents, the dooty on it alone was twelve.  It’s a Paris hat, ladies.  Your sister, your mother, your maiden aunt—­”

Sedyard hearkened, but absently, to the fellow’s words, but his problem was solved.  He would buy Edith something to look pretty in.  She was a pretty girl and in danger of forgetting it.  And she had been decent, John reflected, awfully decent about Mary.  He knew that the entente cordiale which existed between Mary and his mother was largely due to Edith, and he knew, too, that Edith, an authority on modern-housing and model-living, surely but silently disapproved of Mary’s living alone in a three-roomed studio and devoting her days to painting, when there was so much rescue work to be done in the world.

“I get my uplift,” Mary would explain when Edith urged these things upon her, “from the elevator.  Living on the eighth floor, dear, I cannot but help seeing the world from a very different angle.”

Yes, John reflected as he chuckled in retrospect over such conversations, Edith had certainly been awfully decent.

During these meditations several articles of feminine apparel had come and gone under the hammer.  The crowd had decreased somewhat and his position now commanded a clear view of the auctioneer’s platform, and he realized that the fierce light of the arc lamps beat down upon as charming a costume as he had seen for many a day.  All of corn-flower blue it was, a chiffon gown, a big chiffon muff and a plumed hat.  Oh! if he had been allowed to do such shopping for Mary! how quickly he would have entered into the lists of bidders!  Mary’s eyes were just that heavenly shade of blue, but Mary’s pride was as great as her poverty, and the time when he could shower his now useless wealth upon her was not yet.  And then his loyal memory told him that Edith was blue-eyed like all the Sedyards and he knew that his sister’s Christmas gifts stood before him.  He failed, however, to discern in the bland presence of the lay figure, upon which they were disposed to such advantage, the companion of one of the most varied adventures in his long career.

The chiffon finery was rather too much for the Fourteenth Street audience.  The bidding languished.  The auctioneer’s pleadings fell upon deaf ears.  In vain his assistant, a deft-fingered man with a beard, twirled the waxen-faced figure to show the “semi-princesse back” and the “near-Empire front.”  Corn-blue chiffon and panne velvet are not much worn in Fourteenth Street.  The auctioneer grew desperate.  “Twenty-five dollars,” he repeated with such scorn that the timid woman who had made the bid wished herself at home and in bed. “Twenty-five dollars!”

“Throw in the girl, why don’t you?” suggested a facetious youth, chiefly remarkable for a nose, a necktie and a diamond ring.  “She’s a peach all right, all right.  She’s got a smile that won’t come off.”