Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/203

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Forty-ninth Street, offered abundant evidence of prosperity. Lottie explained to Wintergreen that she had furnished it with the profits of her two engagements with the Provincetown Players and, for the moment, until some of the greenness had worn away, Lottie considered it advisable to treat her old friend with circumspection, permitting her only such glimpses of her personal life as it seemed possible to surround with the requisite glamour of respectability. She need have made no exceptional effort in this direction. Wintergreen saw nothing irregular in the visits and conduct of the many young men who swarmed in and out of the place. For the rest, Lottie had warned them that they must keep their hands off the milkmaid.

For the moment, however, until she could be broken in, it was more convenient for Lottie to have Wintergreen out of the place a good part of the day, and she ransacked her brains and pestered her friends for a job for the druggist's daughter. It was difficult to arrive at a decision regarding the nature of this occupation, because, as has been stated, there was nothing that Wintergreen could do. Fortuitously, it was Wintergreen herself who solved the troublous problem. Thoroughly discouraged one day, she was a listless passenger on a Fifth Avenue bus. A man on the seat opposite her interrupted her confused reverie by accosting her politely and demanding if she were a model. At the moment she had not any very precise picture in