“You!” she exclaimed.  “What the—­what brought you here?”

“Oh, Lise!” Janet repeated.

“How did you get here?” Lise demanded, coming toward her.  “Who told you where I was?  What business have you got sleuthing ’round after me like this?”

For a moment Janet was speechless once more, astounded that Lise could preserve her effrontery in such an atmosphere, could be insensible to the evils lurking in this house—­evils so real to Janet that she seemed actually to feel them brushing against her.

“Lise, come away from here,” she pleaded, “come home with me!”

“Home!” said Lise, defiantly, and laughed.  “What do you take me for?  Why would I be going home when I’ve been trying to break away for two years?  I ain’t so dippy as that—­not me!  Go home like a good little girl and march back to the Bagatelle and ask ’em to give me another show standing behind a counter all day.  Nix!  No home sweet home for me!  I’m all for easy street when it comes to a home like that.”

Heartless, terrific as the repudiation was, it struck a self-convicting, almost sympathetic note in Janet.  She herself had revolted against the monotony and sordidness of that existence She herself!  She dared not complete the thought, now.

“But this!” she exclaimed.

“What’s the matter with it?” Lise demanded.  “It ain’t Commonwealth Avenue, but it’s got Fillmore Street beat a mile.  There ain’t no whistles hereto get you out of bed at six a.m., for one thing.  There ain’t no geezers, like Walters, to nag you ’round all day long.  What’s the matter with it?”

Something in Lise’s voice roused Janet’s spirit to battle.

“What’s the matter with it?” she cried.  “It’s hell—­that’s the matter with it.  Can’t you see it?  Can’t you feel it?  You don’t know what it means, or you’d come home with me.”

“I guess I know what it means as well as you do,” said Lise, sullenly.  “We’ve all got to croak sometime, and I’d rather croak this way than be smothered up in Hampton.  I’ll get a run for my money, anyway.”

“No, you don’t know what it means,” Janet repeated, “or you wouldn’t talk like that.  Do you think this man will support you, stick to you?  He won’t, he’ll desert you, and you’ll have to go on the streets.”

A dangerous light grew in Lise’s eyes.

“He’s as good as any other man, he’s as good as Ditmar,” she said.  “They’re all the same, to girls like us.”

Janet’s heart caught, it seemed to stop beating.  Was this a hazard on Lise’s part, or did she speak from knowledge?  And yet what did it matter whether Lise knew or only suspected, if her words were true, if men were all alike?  Had she been a dupe as well as Lise? and was the only difference between them now the fact that Lise was able, without illusion, to see things as they were, to accept the consequences, while she, Janet, had beheld visions and dreamed dreams? was there any real choice between the luxurious hotel