Patricia rarely got further than the imagination—­after that she was idealized or suspected according to the person dealing with her.

Joan idealized Patricia—­“Pat,” she was always called.

The girl was fair and delicately frail, but never ill.  She wrote verse, when moved to do so, and did it excellently, and she never thought of it as poetry.

When she was not moved to verse—­and she had a good market for it—­she designed the most astonishing garments for her friends.  She could, at any time, have secured a fine position in this line and was frequently turning away offers.  When the designing palled upon Pat she fell back upon her personal charm and enjoyed herself!

Patricia had, outwardly, a blood-curdling philosophy which she frankly avowed she believed in, absolutely, though Sylvia warned Joan that it was “bunk!”

What really was the case was this:  Patricia was an adept at playing with fire.  Lightly she tossed the flame from hand to hand; gaily she laughed, but at the critical moment Patricia ran!

She revelled in portraying the fire danger, but she covered her retreats by masterful silence.

“My code is this,” she would proclaim:  “In passing, snatch!  You can discard at leisure.”

There was no doubt but that Patricia did more than her share of snatching.  When she played, she played wildly, but she was a coward when pay time came.

But who was there to show Patricia in her true light?  Her good qualities, and they were many, pleaded for her.  She was too little and sweet to be held to brutal exactions, and she was such a gay, blithesome creature, at her maddest, that when she ran one felt more like commending her speed than hurling epithets of scorn at her.

“If she wasn’t a thousand times better than she makes herself out to be,” Sylvia confided to Joan, “I’d never let her into my studio; but Pat is golden at heart, and she ought to be spanked for acting as she does.”

“Hasn’t she any family?” asked Joan.  “No one whom she may—­hurt?”

“That’s it, my lamb, she hasn’t.  Mother died when she was four years old; father, an actor, but devoted to her, and insisted upon trotting her around with him.  She was confided to the care of cheap boarding-house women; she ran away from school once and travelled miles alone to get to her father, and when he died—­Pat was eighteen then—­she began her career, as she calls it.  Snatch and skip!”

“Poor, dear, little Pat!” said Joan, and her eyes filled.

“There, now!” Sylvia exclaimed, “she’s caught your imagination.”

That was true, and by the magic Joan began to see life as Patricia said she saw it:  a place of detached opportunities and no obligations.

“I believe,” Patricia would say, looking her divinest, “that in developing ourselves we most serve others.  We relieve others of our responsibilities; we express ourselves and have no gnawing ambitions to sour us.  Self-sacrifice is folly—­it makes others mean and selfish, others who may not hold a candle to us for usefulness.  Now”—­and here Patricia, smoking her cigarette, would look impishly at Sylvia, quite forgetting Joan—­“take, for instance, Teddy Burke!”