“How long have you been here?” asked the man with the black mustache; “I never noticed you before.”
“Just a week to-day,” said the manicure, as she soused one of his fat, pudgy paws in the scented water. She didn’t even take the trouble to look up at him as she talked, but applied herself at once to the almost impossible task of making his nails even presentable. It’s a hard job, you know, trying to improve on one of nature’s bum pieces of work.
The man leaned back in his chair contentedly, and with that air of assurance which money begets, and he looked her over as he would have looked over a new style of shirt in a haberdasher’s window. He noted that her hair was dark chestnut in color and luxuriant, also that it was undoubtedly all her own. The contour of her face was such as would have attracted any man with red blood in his veins and a heart to pump it. She had, besides, nice hands that were well kept, and a dainty manner that was rather charming.
“Don’t you ever get tired of doing this kind of work?” he asked, when he had finished his inspection and had sized her up to his apparent satisfaction.
“I am always tired of it,” she answered, briefly.
“How would you like to travel?” was his next question.
 
“I wasn’t arrested, but I was put out as if I were a common swindler”
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Then she paused a moment and glanced up. She was smiling, and the two dimples that came in her cheeks rather enhanced her beauty.
Then he saw that she also had teeth that were white and regular, that her lips were red and her eyelashes long.
You know a bargaining man takes in all these things, just the same as a buyer of beef on the hoof feels and prods the cattle in the search for blemishes.
“There is nothing in the world I would like better than to travel.”
She looked him squarely in the eyes, and her smile was accentuated. Then she resumed her work. As for him he leaned still farther back in the comfortable chair and sucked complacently on his big Havana.
“I knew you was a nice little girl as soon as I saw you.”
“Did you?”
The rapid, supple fingers never paused for a moment in their work, and were trimming, rubbing and polishing those awful nails into some kind of decent shape. The thick, heavy, hairy hand, with its spatulate extremities, showed physical strength and nothing else. It was made for work, and it had worked, too, in its day. It had been used to the most ordinary and menial kind of labor, as the hands of its ancestors had. It had lifted beams and handled picks and shovels. It had pulled at ropes and tugged at heavy burdens. It had had little to do with the gentler side of life, and even the big diamond ring on the fourth finger could not hide its early career.
But an accident happened—a money-making accident which some might call opportunity—and the
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 hands had been withdrawn from their labors, and the callous spots had a chance to disappear—gradually, but none the less surely. The movement of the slim white fingers caused him to look down, and he was conscious of the fact that his heart was beating a bit faster than usual. The blue smoke from his cigar curled up through his mustache, it crept into his eyes and made them sting. Through the haze he noticed that the girl had a bow of black ribbon fastened to her hair.
“I’ll bet you’d be a good sport if you had the chance.”
“That depends upon what you mean by the chance,” she said.
He couldn’t quite analyze that, and so he blurted out:
“Go down the line with me and I’ll show you.”
She paid no attention to that.
“How about it?” he persisted.
“How about what?”
“I’d just like to take you out to a little lunch for two. What time do you break away from here? What time do you knock off?”
“To-night, do you mean?”
“Sure, yes, to-night.”
“Just time enough to go home, and I never go out at night.”
“Tush, tush, now. Be a good fellow, and if I like you I’ll take you on a long trip. You know you said you liked to travel, didn’t you? Well, I’m going to give you a chance, if you behave yourself and stick to me. I’ve been looking for a girl like you for a long while, and you just hit me right, so you’re on the job.
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 I can make good, all right, you needn’t be afraid of that, for I’ve got all kinds of money, and when I meet anybody I like I spend it like a drunken sailor, see?”
“Yes, I see; I knew you had money all the time.”
“You did, did you; well, how?”
“Because it is only men with plenty of money who would talk to a girl the way you have been talking to me. It is only the men with money who think they can buy everything in sight, especially if that which they think they fancy happens to be the wearer of a skirt, and it’s the men with money who think their money is better than anybody else’s money, and their dollars are of more value than the dollars owned or controlled by some one who has less than they have. Are you married?”
“No,” he answered. He would have said more if he had known what to say.
“Then why don’t you go and pick out some woman whom you like and who likes you, and marry her and have it over with. Your time for being a gay sport has passed; leave that to the young fellows.”
Daintily she reddened his nails with rouge, doing them as carefully as if they were works of art, and tapping each one gently in order to get just the right amount of color.
“I don’t think,” she went on, “that you quite know what you’ve been up against. You may have heard the old saying, ‘a burnt child dreads the fire;’ well, I’m the child in this case, although I’m no child in years. As I told you before, I’ve been here a week, and it’s a great relief to me to be working, for I’ve been on one of those little trips you were just talking about, and
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 there is nothing to it. You see,” then she glanced up quickly, “perhaps you don’t want to hear this.”
“That’s all right; go ahead, you can’t hurt my ............