"I thought I had a quaint little silhouette of metropolitan life for you," De Ruyter responded, smiling back; "but you spoil the picture if you guy it like that."
"Very curious it is," said Barry—"very curious, indeed. 'How far a little candle throws its beams.' I don't think that the custom was exported from Ireland or from England—at least, I do not recall anything analogous."
"I've heard an old Irishwoman complain that the law was harder here on the tenant than it was in the old country," Miss Peters asserted; and then she appended an imitation of the old Irishwoman's speech: "'Sure, they'd boycott the landlord there, that's what they'd do, or they'd shoot the agent, maybe; but here ye can't—there's the police, bad cess to 'em!'"
"Have you ever seen the candle in the plate?" Barry asked her, across the table.
"Never," she answered.
"But you have heard of it?" De Ruyter inquired.
"Never before to-night," was her reply.
"You don't mean to say you don't believe that there is any such custom?" Mrs. Jimmy asked. "Thus all our illusions are shattered one by one."
"Of course, I don't know," the girl responded; "I haven't been working down there very long—only since last February. But it sounds like it was a fake, as we used to say in the newspaper office when I was a reporter."
Mrs. Jimmy Suydam had never met Miss Peters before, and now she examined the girl curiously, wondering what sort of being a woman was who had been a reporter and was now living among the poor, and who happened also to be dining at Mrs. Canton's.