"Really!" says Mrs. Pell. "Is he going to do that?"
"Got it straight from him," says I. "There! he's worked his courage up. Now he takes the plunge."
"Why!" says Sadie, "that is Miss Belter's number he's going into."
"She don't live on all five floors, does she?" says I.
"No; but it's odd, just the same," says she.
I thought so myself; so I gives 'em the whole story of how I come to know about what he was up to. By that time he was climbing the stairs, and as soon as we finds the right door I forgets all about Swifty in sizin' up Cornelia Ann.
Say, what a difference a little of the right kind of dry goods will make in a girl, won't it? The last I saw of Cornie she was wearin' a skirt that sagged in the back, a punky lid that might have come off the top of an ash can, and shoes that had run over at the heel.
But prosperity had sure blown her way, and she'd bought a wardrobe to suit the times. Not that she'd gone and loaded herself down like she was a window display. It was just a cucumber green sort of cheese cloth that floated around her, and there wa'n't a frill on it except some silvery braid where the square hole had been chopped out to let her head and part of her shoulders through. But at that it didn't need any Paris tag.
And say, I'd always had an idea that Cornelia Ann was rated about third row back. Seein' the way she showed up there, though, with all that cinnamon coloured hair of hers piled on top of her head, and her big eyes glistenin', I had to revise the frame up. It didn't take me long to find out she'd shook the shrinkin' violet game, too. She steps up and gives us the glad hand and the gurgly jolly just as if she'd been doin' it all her life.
It wa'n't any cheap hang-out that Cornie has tacked her name plate on, either. There was expensive rugs on the floor, and brass lamps hangin' from the ceilin', and pieces of tin armor hung around on the walls, with nary a sign of an oil stove or a foldin' bed.