“I don’t know what that has got to do with it,” growled the man, and he tried to quicken his pace; but she kept up with him.

“It’s got a good deal to do with it,” said she.  “I know a place on Sixth Avenue where you can get an elegant front-piece that nobody could ever tell, for three dollars and forty-nine cents.  Another gentleman friend of mine—­he’s a sort of relation of mine; my sister was his first wife—­got one there.  Yes, sir, you’ll have to get one, and you’ll have to get your face massaged and your eyebrows blacked, and, Lord! you’ll have to have that beard shaved off and have a mustache, if you get anything at all.  Lord! you look as if you’d come right out of the Old Testament.  I don’t see why you’re wasting your time hanging around offices for, without you see to that, first of all.  I should think your wife would tell you, but I suppose she’s the same sort.  Now as for you,” she added, turning again to Carroll, “if you just get polished up a little bit—­say, here’s the card of my beauty-doctor” (she produced a card from an ornate wrist-bag)—­“you’ll look dandy.”

Suddenly the woman, with a quick good-bye, turned to cross Broadway, but her good-nature and sympathy had something fine and inexhaustible, for even then she turned back to look encouragingly upon the older, soured, bitter, ungrateful man with Carroll, and she said:  “You go ’long with him, and I guess you’ll get a place, too.  Good-bye.”

With that she was gone, passing as straight as if she owned an unassailable right of way through the press of vehicles.  Just as she gained the opposite sidewalk a fire-engine thundered up.

“She had a close call from that,” Carroll said.  His face had altered.  He still looked amused.

“That woman couldn’t get run over if she tried,” said the other man.

“There ain’t nothing made in the country that can run over her.  It’s women like her that’s keeping men out of the places that belong to them by right.”

“I am afraid there was some truth in her theory and her advice,” Carroll said, laughing, and looking after the second engine clanging through the scattering crowd.

“Well, I guess when I go to buying women’s frizzes to wear to get a place, she’ll know it,” said the other man.  “Good lord! if it’s the outside of the head they want, why don’t they get dummies and done with it?  I tell you what is needed is a new union.”

Just at that moment they reached a restaurant from which came an odor of soup.  Carroll turned to his companion.  “I am going in here to get some lunch,” he said.  “I don’t know what kind of a place it is, but if you will go with me, I shall take pleasure in—­”

But the man turned upon him fiercely.  “I ’ain’t got quite so low yet that I have to eat at another man’s expense,” he said.  “You needn’t think, because you wear a better coat than I do, that—­” The man stopped and nodded his head, speechless, and went on, and was out of sight, but Carroll had seen tears in the angry eyes.