“Joan!  Joan!” was all she said as she drew Joan in.  Then, after a struggle, “Do you mind if I—­sob?”

“No, I’m going to do it myself.”  And Joan proceeded to do so and remembered Nancy.

“I’m so—­happy!” she gulped.  “I was never so happy in my life.  I feel as if I’d got hatched, broken through the shell!”

“You have,” cried Sylvia, unevenly.  “We’re going to—­to conquer everything!  Come in your room, Joan, shed as much as you like.  I expected you this morning.  I have only bacon and eggs—­shall we go out to eat?”

“Go out?  Heavens, no!  And I adore bacon and eggs.  Sylvia, I have edged into glory!”

“You have, Joan—­edged in, that’s about it.”

After the meal before the fire they cleared things away, and then they talked far into the night.  Sylvia had already laid emphasis upon her small order.

“And really, Joan, that’s great,” she explained; “many a girl has to wait longer.  Some day I’m going to be hung in the best exhibitions in town, but as a starter a magazine is nothing to be sneered at.  I’m modelling, too—­I have a duck of an idea for a frieze—­only I’m not telling anybody about that—­it’s too ambitious.  What are you going to do, Joan?” This sudden question made Joan stare.

“I—­I don’t know,” she replied, frankly, but with no shade of despondency.  “I’ll take a look around to-morrow and, then pack my little wares in my basket and peddle them, as you have done.  If anybody wants a dancer—­here I am!  Anybody want funny little songs sung?—­here’s your girl!  I seem to have only samples.  I can be adaptable.  That’s my big asset.”  They both laughed, but Sylvia soon grew serious.  Her short service in reality had already sobered her.  It was one thing for the gifted young girl of a fashionable school to watch the impression she made by her wits upon people who were paying high for just such exhibitions, and quite another to convince buyers of goods that they were what you believed them to be.

“The public is a tightwad,” was what she muttered presently, “unless you’re willing to compromise or—­prove it to them.”

“I—­I don’t know what you mean,” Joan replied.  She was groping after the thing that had made Sylvia’s eyes grow old.

“Well, all you need to know, Joan, my lamb, is to prove it to them—­never compromise!” Sylvia was herself again.  Too well she knew the value of starting out with one’s shield bright and shining even if one had to come home on it, all rusted with one’s life blood.

Things were not yet very tragic for Sylvia, and her shield was in good condition, but she had an imagination and a keen sense of self-protection.

“We’re going to be the happiest pair in town,” she whispered to Joan later that night as she bent over the tired girl; “and was there ever such a spot to live in?  See, I’m going to raise your shade high, for the night is splendid and—­the stars!  Go to sleep with the stars watching you, old girl, and you’re all right.”