The sylph's head came up with a snap.
"I shouldn't be surprised if it did 'elp," she fluted, "but I sharn't do it, just the same. W'y don't you arsk for the loan of my Sunday frock, and 'ave done with it? Arn't I helping you enough, as it is?"
Daisy, unabashed and with a little shrug, donned her slightly soiled waist and brushed the worst of the lint from her travel-wrinkled skirt. Then she picked up her telescope grip, and swung it gaily.
"Well, I'm off," was the verbal fashion of her parting, as she skipped down the stairs.
In spite of the sylph's assiduity of helpfulness, the latter made no particular demonstration of partiality as, from the head of the stairway, she watched the girl descend.
"Ee-yes," she murmured to herself, "they would put that saucy miss waitin' at table, in 'ere where my Bob is clerkin'. 'E's a bit rough at the start-off with the gels, Bob is—but 'e's dreadful soft-'artid when a gel once gets 'im gowing."
CHAPTER V. A Job.
Daisy Nixon flung out of the door of the Imperial Hotel into an afternoon world of dust and din and ecstasy. It was the hour when stenographers, in offices, whose high open windows command the streets with their emancipated pedestrians, begin to rubber over-shoulder at the clock, and to make excursions into washrooms to veneer the fresh color of cheek and chin and forehead with cadaverous conventional powder. The "boys" have been educated to look for this make-up (it takes an educated taste to appreciate it!) and a girl would as soon think of leaving the office in her stocking-feet, as without a blue-white effect on chin and nose and forehead, and a smudge of strangulation purple blotting the cheek's own inimitable rose.