meet him.  Janet, also, had recently been self-convicted of sharing with Lise the same questionable tendency toward self-adornment to please the eye of man.  The very next Saturday night after she had indulged in that mad extravagance of the blue suit, Lise had brought home from the window of The Paris in Faber Street a hat that had excited the cupidity and admiration of Miss Schuler and herself, and in front of which they had stood languishing on three successive evenings.  In its acquisition Lise had expended almost the whole of a week’s salary.  Its colour was purple, on three sides were massed drooping lilac feathers, but over the left ear the wide brim was caught up and held by a crescent of brilliant paste stones.  Shortly after this purchase—­the next week, in fact,—­The Paris had alluringly and craftily displayed, for the tempting sum of $6.29, the very cloak ordained by providence to “go” with the hat.  Miss Schuler declared it would be a crime to fail to take advantage of such an opportunity but the trouble was that Lise had had to wait for two more pay-days and endure the suspense arising from the possibility that some young lady of taste and means might meanwhile become its happy proprietor.  Had not the saleslady been obdurate, Lise would have had it on credit; but she did succeed, by an initial payment the ensuing Saturday, in having it withdrawn from public gaze.  The second Saturday Lise triumphantly brought the cloak home; a velvet cloak,—­if the eyes could be believed,—­velvet bordering on plush, with a dark purple ground delicately and artistically spotted with a lilac to match the hat feathers, and edged with a material which—­if not too impudently examined and no questions asked—­might be mistaken, by the uninitiated male, for the fur of a white fox.  Both investments had been made, needless to say, on the strength of Janet’s increased salary; and Lise, when Janet had surprised her before the bureau rapturously surveying the combination, justified herself with a defiant apology.

“I just had to have something—­what with winter coming on,” she declared, seizing the hand mirror in order to view the back.  “You might as well get your clothes chick, while you’re about it—­and I didn’t have to dig up twenty bones, neither—­nor anything like it—­” a reflection on Janet’s most blue suit and her abnormal extravagance.  For it was Lise’s habit to carry the war into the enemy’s country.  “Sadie’s dippy about it—­says it puts her in mind of one of the swells snapshotted in last Sunday’s supplement.  Well, dearie, how does the effect get you?” and she wheeled around for her sister’s inspection.

“If you take my advice, you’ll be careful not to be caught out in the rain.”

“What’s chewin’ you now?” demanded Lise.  She was not lacking in imagination of a certain sort, and Janet’s remark did not fail in its purpose of summoning up a somewhat abject image of herself in wet velvet and bedraggled feathers—­an image suggestive of a certain hunted type of woman Lise and her kind held in peculiar horror.  And she was the more resentful because she felt, instinctively, that the memory of this suggestion would never be completely eradicated:  it would persist, like a canker, to mar the completeness of her enjoyment of these clothes.  She swung on Janet furiously.