“You are dressed most too well.  It’s all very well to look stylish, to look as if you had been earning twenty-five hundred a year, but, Lord! you look as if you had been getting ten!  The bosses might be a little afraid of you.  They might say they didn’t see how a man could have dressed like you do, unless he had helped himself to some of the firm’s cash.  See?  I don’t mean any offence.  You look to me like a real gentleman.”

“Thank you,” replied Carroll.

“If I was you I’d put on a pair of pants not quite so nicely creased, and I’d sell that overcoat and get a good-style ready-made one.  Your chances would be a heap better—­honest.”

“Thank you,” said Carroll, again.  He was conscious of amusement and a curious sense of a mental tonic from this loud-voiced, eagerly helpful female.

“I’m right, you bet,” said she.  “But otherwise it wouldn’t take much.  You go and have a little something put on your hair, and have your face massaged a little, and if I was you I’d buy a red tie.  You can get a dandy red tie at Steele & Esterbrook’s for a quarter.  That one you have on makes you look kinder pale.  Then a red tie is younger.  Say, I’ll tell you, if you would only have your mustache trimmed, and wax the ends, it would make no end of difference.”

“What are you going to do when you are asked how old you are?  Lie?” inquired the other man, in his bitter, sardonic voice.

This time the woman regarded him with slight indignation.  “Say,” said she, “you’ll never get a place if you don’t act pleasanter.  Places ain’t to be got that way, I can tell you.  You’ve got to act as if you’d eat nothin’ but butter an’ honey for a fortnight.  If you feel mad, you’d better keep it in your insides.”  Then she answered his questions.  “No, I ain’t goin’ to lie, and I ain’t goin’ to tell anybody else to lie,” said she.  “Lying ain’t my style.  But it ain’t anybody’s business how old you are, anyhow.  I don’t know what right a man that I go to get a place from has got to ask how old I be.  All he has any right to know is whether I ain’t too old to do my work.  I don’t lie; no, siree.  All I say is, and kinder laugh, ’Well, call it twenty-five,’ or you might call it thirty, and with some, again, you might call it thirty-two or three.  That ain’t lyin’ if I know what lyin’ is.”  As the woman spoke her face assumed precisely the mischievous, challenging smile with which she had replied to similar questions.  Carroll laughed, and the other man also, although grudgingly.

“Well,” he said, “there’s different ways of looking at a lie.”

“It wouldn’t be any manner of use for you to say you wouldn’t see twenty-eight again, no matter how much you got fixed up,” the woman retorted.  “But I guess you can get something, if it ain’t quite so good.  I have a gentleman friend who is over fifty and who said he was thirty-seven, and he got a dandy place last week.  But I tell you you’ll have to hustle more’n this other gentleman.  You’re bald, ain’t you?”