window? Wherever she was, whatever doing, I could see the joy, lit radiant in her face, at the sound of his voice.

Then, when I thought of his return, I thought as well of him. The sudden picture of his face came straight into my eyes. I heard his voice. I heard his laughter. My God! thought I, what hopelessness to wait for such a man as that! Surely she knew the worthless kind he was? No, it was more likely she did not. So few, few women do.

"But what law of God or Nature is it," said I to myself, "that makes men treat women so?" Had there been an answer which left one shred of dignity to my back, I might have made it. So far as I could see there was none. "Unless," I thought, "unless it is she asks no better of us and gets but little more."

The words had scarcely entered my mind when I was contradicted flatly to my face. From a doorway as I passed I heard a woman's voice.

"Here, I say."

I stopped, peering into the shadow. A girl was there, sheltering beneath the overhanging portal of the door.

"What is it?" I asked.

Perhaps the tone of genuine inquiry in my voice, no doubt a thousand other things as well, checked her in what she was going to say, for she caught the words and shut her lips upon them.

"What is it?" I asked again.

She screwed up her face into a smile; no doubt to hide the injured dignity in her heart.

"Would you like to give me my cab fare home?" said she.

Now had I received a blow of her hand across my face I should not have felt more surprise. It was so direct an answer to my assumption, to the very question I had put myself but a few steps back. I had assumed that women received the worst from us because they asked no better. Yet what better can a woman ask of any man than charity?

In some awkward effort to explain I have said that life has never reached me—no woman has ever come to me in trouble. But it is more than that—and it is less. I have often wanted a woman to say to me, "Come and buy me a hat." No woman ever has. I have known women whom I would like to have adorned from the top of their dainty heads to the soles of their elegant feet; but either it is that they have husbands who do it for them or there is some ridiculous 

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