"It'll do for a starter. Give him a dollar."
"Anything more to-day?" Ringa asked, rising slowly.
"No; I'll let you know if I want you," said the Madam.
Ringa slouched out.
"I'd let that cool off a while till he's forgotten it," Vixley suggested.
"I'll make him forget it, all right," Madam Spoll returned. "That's my business. You do your part as well as I do mine and you'll be all right."
"It's only this first part that makes me nervous."
"Oh, he ain't going to catch me in a trap. I got sense enough to put a mouse in first to try it."
She stood in front of the mirror in the folding-bed, arranging her hair, which had been wet and still glistened with moisture, holding her comb, meanwhile, in her mouth. Professor Vixley tilted back in his plush chair, his head resting against the grease-spot on the wall-paper which indicated his habitual pose.
"Now don't you go too fast," he said, pulling out a square of chewing-tobacco and biting off a corner. "This here is a-goin' to be a delicate operation. Payson ain't so easy as Bennett was. Bennett would believe that cows was cucumbers, if we told him so, but this chap is too much on the skeptic. We got to go slow."