“What have you got there, angel face?” she demanded.

“A new suit,” said Janet.

“You don’t tell me—­where’d you get it? at the Paris?”

“No, at Dowling’s.”

“Say, I’ll bet it was that plain blue thing marked down to twenty!”

“Well, what if it was?”

Lise, when surprised or scornful, had a peculiarly irritating way of whistling through her teeth.

“Twenty bucks!  Gee, you’ll be getting your clothes in Boston next.  Well, as sure as I live when I went by that window the other day when they first knocked it down I said to Sadie, `those are the rags Janet would buy if she had the ready.’  Have you got another raise out of Ditmar?”

“If I have, it isn’t any business of yours,” Janet retorted.  “I’ve got a right to do as I please with my own money.”

“Oh sure,” said Lise, and added darkly:  “I guess Ditmar likes to see you look well.”

After this Janet refused obstinately to speak to Lise, to answer, when they reached home, her pleadings and complaints to their mother that Janet had bought a new suit and refused to exhibit it.  And finally, when they had got to bed, Janet lay long awake in passionate revolt against this new expression of the sordidness and lack of privacy in which she was forced to live, made the more intolerable by the close, sultry darkness of the room and the snoring of Lise.

In the morning, however, after a groping period of semiconsciousness during the ringing of the bells, the siren startled her into awareness and alertness.  It had not wholly lost its note of terror, but the note had somehow become exhilarating, an invitation to adventure and to life; and Lise’s sarcastic comments as to the probable reasons why she did not put on the new suit had host their power of exasperation.  Janet compromised, wearing a blouse of china silk hitherto reserved for “best.”  The day was bright, and she went rapidly toward the mill, glorying in the sunshine and the autumn sharpness of the air; and her thoughts were not so much of Ditmar as of something beyond him, of which he was the medium.  She was going, not to meet him, but to meet that.  When she reached the office she felt weak, her fingers trembled as she took off her hat and jacket and began to sort out the mail.  And she had to calm herself with the assurance that her relationship with Ditmar had undergone no change.  She had merely met him by the canal, and he had talked to her.  That was all.  He had, of course, taken her arm:  it tingled when she remembered it.  But when he suddenly entered the room her heart gave a bound.  He closed the door, he took off his hat, and stood gazing at her—­while she continued arranging letters.  Presently she was forced to glance at him.  His bearing, his look, his confident smile all proclaimed that he, at least, believed things to be changed.  He glowed with health and vigour, with an aggressiveness from which she shrank, yet found delicious.