Thorny was standing by the table.  One or two other girls were in the room, Miss Sherman was mending a glove, Miss Cashell stood in the roof doorway, manicuring her nails with a hairpin.  Miss Elsie Kirk sat in the corner seat, with her arm about the bowed shoulders of another girl, who was crying, with her head on the table.

“If you would mind your own affairs for about five minutes, Miss Thornton,” Elsie Kirk was saying passionately, as Susan came in, “you’d be a good deal better off!”

“I consider what concerns Front Office concerns me!” said Miss Thornton loftily.

“Ah, don’t!” Miss Sherman murmured pitifully.

“If Violet wasn’t such a darn fool—­” Miss Cashell said lightly, and stopped.

“What is it?” asked Susan.

Her voice died on a dead silence.  Miss Thornton, beginning to gather up veil and gloves and handbag scattered on the table, pursed her lips virtuously.  Miss Cashell manicured steadily.  Miss Sherman bit off a thread.

“It’s nothing at all!” said Elsie Kirk, at last.  “My sister’s got a headache, that’s all, and she doesn’t feel well.”  She patted the bowed shoulders.  “And parties who have nothing better to do,” she added, viciously turning to Miss Thornton, “have butted in about it!”

“I’m all right now,” said Violet suddenly, raising a face so terribly blotched and swollen from tears that Susan was genuinely horrified.  Violet’s weak eyes were set in puffy rings of unnatural whiteness, her loose, weak little mouth sagged, her bosom, in its preposterous, transparent white lace shirtwaist, rose and fell convulsively.  In her voice was some shocking quality of unwomanliness, some lack of pride, and reserve, and courage.

“All I wanted was to do like other girls do,” said the swollen lips, as Violet began to cry again, and to dab her eyes with a soaked rag of a handkerchief.  “I never meant nothing!  ‘N’ Mamma says she knows it wasn’t all my fault!” she went on, half maudlin in her abandonment.

Susan gasped.  There was a general gasp.

“Don’t, Vi!” said her sister tenderly.  “It ain’t your fault if there are skunks in the world like Mr. Phil Hunter,” she said, in a reckless half-whisper.  “If Papa was alive he’d shoot him down like a dog!”

“He ought to be shot down!” cried Susan, firing.

“Well, of course he ought!” Miss Elsie Kirk, strong under opposition, softened suddenly under this championship, and began to tremble.  “Come on, Vi,” said she.

“Well, of course he ought,” Thorny said, almost with sympathy.  “Here, let’s move the table a little, if you want to get out.”

“Well, why do you make such a fuss about it?” Miss Cashell asked softly.  “You know as well as—­as anyone else, that if a man gets a girl into trouble, he ought to stand for—­”

“Yes, but my sister doesn’t take that kind of money!” flashed Elsie bitterly.