“But the cost!” I wailed.  “We have spent so sinfully much already!  And the place is eating its head off, with nothing coming in.  Since I took down those bill-boards, actually the price of that Lafayette Street lot has gone down.  Nobody seems anxious to buy it any more.”

“Change your mind about selling it; hint that you’re considering an ice-cream parlor and a movie theater,” said the girl who’d been the worst file-clerk.  “In the meantime, Sophy, you have sense enough to understand that we’ve spent so much money we’ve got to spend more to get some of it back.—­I vote we start in this one, Sophy,” and she laid her finger upon the most expensive and ultra of all the magazines!

“But that is for millionaires!” said I, aghast.

“So is Hynds House,” insisted Alicia, coolly.  “How much did you say was in the bank?”

I was afraid to hear my own voice mention that insignificant sum; for, when one considered Hynds House, the little we had was beggarly; so I wrote it down, and pushed the paper across to her.  Instead of looking scared, Alicia Gaines looked delighted!

“All that?” And round chin on pink palm, she fell to studying me with as much curiosity as if she had just met me and were puzzled to get at the real Me.  Then she nodded, and snatching a sheet of paper, began to figure again, pausing every now and then to regard me with slitted eyes.  At the end of ten strenuous minutes she pushed the paper over to me, and watched me grow all but apoplectic as I studied it.  It was an entertaining list, beginning with a hat and ending with silk stockings.  With all sorts of wonderful things in between—­for me, you understand.  Things like “One brown frock, with something cloudy-yellow about it.” ("Sophy, blondes can stand yellow wonderfully well; I suggest a bronze, instead of a duller brown.”)

“Why, I have plenty of clothes!” I protested.

“Business-woman-of-a-certain-age, general-utility, will-stand-wear-and-tear clothes.  Not a stitch of Hyndshousey clothes among them.  No happy, glad-I’m-alive-and-a woman clothes.  Here’s where you cease to look merely useful, respectable, and responsible, and begin to look the Lady of the Castle.  There’s quite as much philosophy and good morals in looking like a butterfly as there is in resembling a caterpillar.”

“Why should I have more clothes?” I demanded.

“Because.”  And she added, with a fleeting smile, “And then catch your hare.”

“Alicia!” said I, scandalized.  “Alicia Gaines, do you realize I am thirty-six years old?”

“You wouldn’t be if you just had sense enough to forget to remember it.”  This resentfully.

“No?  Would you mind telling me how I might become such an accomplished forgetter?”

“Why, there’s nothing easier!  When you really wish to forget to remember something, Sophy, all you have to do is to remember to forget it!” And then, with real earnestness:  “Sophy, it’s the better part of wisdom to look like the job you want to hold down.  Your job is holding down Hynds House.  And we are up against things, Sophy, you and I. We have got to win out because it means—­all this.”  Her eyes swept over the beautiful old room with an immense pride and affection.