Interrupted, she looked up with a start that all but spilled the ink and cried in a voice heavily coloured with the enervating brogue of the Southern born:
In the act of unpinning her hat (a straw that even a drowning woman would have hesitated to grasp at) Miss Manvers paused to consult an invalid alarm-clock which was suffering palpitations on an adjacent shelf.
"Twenty past three," she reported, sententious.
The artist cocked her head, squinted malevolently at her drawing, dipped, and busily scratched once more.
"Scared me," she explained: "coming home so early!"
Sally removed her collar with a wrench and a grunt: "Got a date?"
"What do you want--a day like this? I'm half-cooked already, and I guess I can go through a little fire for the sake of a sixty-cent _table d' hôte_ and a trip to Coney. But you needn't worry; it'll be hotter than this before Sammy warms up enough to singe anything. His intentions are so praiseworthy they pain him; he blushes every time he has to recognise the sex question long enough to discuss the delights of monogamy in a two-family house within commuting distance of Prospect Park South."
"You don't mean to say you've got that far along--already!"
"That's the reward of a year's steady angling, honey."
"Heavens, but how you must carry on with Sammy!"
"Believe me, it's something scandalous," sighed Lucy Spode.
"But why--" Sally began in a tone of expostulation.
The other quickened with a flash of temper. "Don't ask me! I came No'th to study art and mingle with the world of intellect and fashion, and after three years I'm drawing heads for fashion magazines at a dollar per, and I know a minor poet who's acquainted with the assistant editor of _The Scrap-Book_, and the one man I know who owns a dress-suit gets fifty cents an hour for posing in it. If that isn't enough to make me welcome even the prospect of married life with Sammy Myerick and a woman to do the washing, I don't know--"
"Well, if you aren't crazy about Sammy, why not chuck him? Marriage isn't the last resource for a girl like you. You've got just as many wits to live on as the next one. This town's full of young women no better-looking than either of us, and with even less intelligence, who manage pretty comfortably, thank you, on the living the world owes them."