As Mrs. Parker’s roomers sat thus one summer’s evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh: 

“Why, there’s Billy Jackson!  I can see him from down here, too.”

All looked up—­some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided.

“It’s that star,” explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger.  “Not the big one that twinkles—­the steady blue one near it.  I can see it every night through my skylight.  I named it Billy Jackson.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker.  “I didn’t know you were an astronomer, Miss Leeson.”

“Oh, yes,” said the small star gazer, “I know as much as any of them about the style of sleeves they’re going to wear next fall in Mars.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker.  “The star you refer to is Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia.  It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its meridian passage is—­”

“Oh,” said the very young Mr. Evans, “I think Billy Jackson is a much better name for it.”

“Same here,” said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker.  “I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of those old astrologers had.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker.

“I wonder whether it’s a shooting star,” remarked Miss Dorn.  “I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.”

“He doesn’t show up very well from down here,” said Miss Leeson.  “You ought to see him from my room.  You know you can see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well.  At night my room is like the shaft of a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with.”

There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable papers home to copy.  And when she went out in the morning, instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys.  This went on.

There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker’s stoop at the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant.  But she had had no dinner.

As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance.  He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche.  She dodged, and caught the balustrade.  He tried for her hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face.  Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing.  She passed Mr. Skidder’s door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to “pirouette across stage from L to the side of the Count.”  Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the door of the skylight room.

She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress.  She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs.  And in that Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled.