“I’ll tell you what has got to be done, sir, and how we can help ourselves,” returned the other, with a ranting voice which made people turn and stare at him.  “I’ll tell you.  We’ve got to form a union.  There are unions for everything else.  We have got to have a union of older men qualified to work, who are shouldered out of it by boys.  Once that is done, we are all right.  To-day in this country a man can’t hire whom he pleases in most things.  The unions have put it out of his power.  The people have risen.  We belong to a part of the people who haven’t risen.  Now we must rise.  Let us form a union, I say.  If they engage young men before us, there are ways of making them smart for it, the employers as well as the employes.  I tell you that has got to be done.”

Suddenly the men heard a laugh behind them.  It was a woman’s laugh, shrill and not altogether pleasant—­not the laugh of a young woman, but the woman who came up with and immediately began to speak looked quite young.  She was undeniably pretty.  Her blond pompadour drooped coquettishly over one eye, her cheeks were pink, her face smooth, her figure was really superb, and she was very well dressed, in a tailor-made gown, smart furs, and a hat evidently of the English-tailor make.

“Excuse me,” she said, with perfect assurance, and yet with nothing of offensive boldness, rather with an air of camaraderie, “but I heard you talking, you two, and I thought I would give you a few points.  I don’t know whether you know it or not, but I have recently secured the position of cashier there, in Adkins & Somers’s.”  She motioned with one nicely gloved hand back towards the place they had just left.  “I got it in preference to about a dozen young girls, too,” she said, with triumph, “but I shouldn’t have if—­” She hesitated a minute.  The color on her cheeks deepened under the floating veil, and there was, in consequence, a curious effect of two shades of rose on her cheeks.  “See here,” she said, walking along with them, “I don’t know you two men from Adam, and I needn’t take the trouble, and if you don’t like it you can lump it, but I’m going to say something.  I know I look young.  I ain’t fishing for a compliment.  I know it.  I’ve got a looking-glass in a good light, and I’ve got my eyes in my head, and, what’s more, I’m spunky enough to own it to myself if I don’t look young; but I ain’t young.  I ain’t going to say how old I am, but I will say this much, I ain’t young.  I’ve been married twice and I’ve had three children.  My first husband died, the second went off and left me.  I’ve got a daughter fourteen years old I’m keeping in school.  She ain’t going into a department store, if I work my fingers to the bone.”  She said the last with a fierce air that made her for a second really look younger.  “Well,” she went on.  “I’ll tell you, too.  I had a good place for a number of years, but the man died in September, and the man that took the business put his sister in my place.  Then I was out of