“And you still keep on speaking to me?”

“Now look here, Joe, if you ’ve been drinking, I ’ll forgive you; if you ain’t, you go on and leave me.  Say, what do you take me for?  Do you think I ’d throw down a friend because somebody else talked about him?  Well, you don’t know Hat Sterling.  When Minty told me that story, she was back in my dressing-room, and I sent her out o’ there a-flying, and with a tongue-lashing that she won’t forget for a month o’ Sundays.”

“I reckon that was the reason she jumped on me so hard at the club.”  He chuckled.  He had taken heart again.  All that Sadness had said was true, after all, and people thought no less of him.  His joy was unbounded.

“So she jumped on you hard, did she?  The cat!”

“Oh, she did n’t say a thing to me.”

“Well, Joe, it ’s just like this.  I ain’t an angel, you know that, but I do try to be square, and whenever I find a friend of mine down on his luck, in his pocket-book or his feelings, why, I give him my flipper.  Why, old chap, I believe I like you better for the stiff upper lip you ’ve been keeping under all this.”

“Why, Hattie,” he broke out, unable any longer to control himself, “you ’re—­you ’re——­”

“Oh, I ’m just plain Hat Sterling, who won’t throw down her friends.  Now come on and get something to eat.  If that thing is at the club, we ’ll go there and show her just how much her talk amounted to.  She thinks she ’s the whole game, but I can spot her and then show her that she ain’t one, two, three.”

When they reached the Banner, they found Minty still there.  She tried on the two the same tactics that she had employed so successfully upon Joe alone.  She nudged her companion and tittered.  But she had another person to deal with.  Hattie Sterling stared at her coldly and indifferently, and passed on by her to a seat.  Joe proceeded to order supper and other things in the nonchalant way that the woman had enjoined upon him.  Minty began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, but it was her business not to be beaten.  She laughed outright.  Hattie did not seem to hear her.  She was beckoning Sadness to her side.  He came and sat down.

“Now look here,” she said, “you can’t have any supper because you have n’t reached the stage of magnificent hunger to make a meal palatable to you.  You ’ve got so used to being nearly starved that a meal don’t taste good to you under any other circumstances.  You ’re in on the drinks, though.  Your thirst is always available.—­Jack,” she called down the long room to the bartender, “make it three.—­Lean over here, I want to talk to you.  See that woman over there by the wall?  No, not that one,—­the big light woman with Griggs.  Well, she ’s come here with a story trying to throw Joe down, and I want you to help me do her.”

“Oh, that ’s the one that upset our young friend, is it?” said Sadness, turning his mournful eyes upon Minty.