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Lise would have had it on credit; but she did succeed, by an initial payment the ensuing Saturday, in having it withdrawn from public gaze.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.

“I get you, all right!” she cried.  “I guess I know what’s eatin’ you!  You’ve got money to burn and you’re sore because I spend mine to buy what I need.  You don’t know how to dress yourself any more than one of them Polak girls in the mills, and you don’t want anybody else to look nice.”

And Janet was impelled to make a retort of almost equal crudity:—­“If I were a man and saw you in those clothes I wouldn’t wait for an introduction.  You asked me what I thought.  I don’t care about the money!” she exclaimed passionately.  “I’ve often told you you were pretty enough without having to wear that kind of thing—­to make men stare at you.”

“I want to know if I don’t always look like a lady!  And there’s no man living would try to pick me up more than once.”  The nasal note in Lise’s voice had grown higher and shriller, she was almost weeping with anger.  “You want me to go ‘round lookin’ like a floorwasher.”