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Pufelipd on I lie firsl Sunday of each month as a section of the N. V. American, Boston American, Chicago Examiner, Hearst’s American, Atlanta, Ga.,and the second Sunday of each month with the San Francisco Examiner and Los Angeles Examiner ‘And yet can you blame me?” She seized his head fiercely, bent it back and kissed him Chapter V IIEN Emmy and her mother ar rived in New York they went to a small boarding-house on East Twenty - fourth Street, recom mended to them by some friends who had spent several weeks there while visiting the city. It was a quiet, old-fashioned house, with an atmosphere of dignity about it which even the little white slip of paper, with the words “Rooms and Board,” pasted on the casing of the doorway, could not entirely destroy. The place was like most of its kind. It was steeped in an unmistakable and characteristic odor, composed apparently of equal parts of soap, cooking and escaping gas, with a sub-flavor of mould. I he dining-room in the basement held one large table and three smaller ones, all waited on by a huge and militant-looking colored girl, black as Erebus. Here there gathered, at meal-times, a middle-aged couple, who sat through their meals in stony and aggrieved silence, as though reproaching the world for its levity; an elderly clerk in a nearby depart ment store; a widow, who treasured her grief as apparently her sole earthly possession; a musician, who talked shop incessantly; a young woman, with glasses, who taught school; a mysterious man, with Synopsis of Previous Chapters—‘‘My only asset in the world is iny good looks,” concludes Emmy Moran early in her life in a small town of the middle west. Emmy is quite as determined to be tech nically a good woman as her conventional sister Katie. Katie is horrified at Emmy’s evidences of what she considers “mental immor ality.” While Emmy scorns the low salaried youths of her neigh borhood, Katie accepts one. Soon after the wedding Mr. Moran dies, leaving only a little insurance money. Emmy learns shorthand and persuades her mother to come to New York with her scanty capital and invest it in Emmy. dark mustaches, who never spoke of his business at all, and whom his fellow-boarders had decided among themselves to be a desperate character (he was, in reality, a salesman of ladies’ underwear); and a young newspaper man, who cocked an approv ing eye at Emmy, sitting next to him, and made conversation about the weather and the butter. This young man was, in a way, the star boarder, since he occupied the parlor and adjoining alcove bedroom on the ground floor. The parlor he called his studio, and Emmy and her mother had not been in the house a week before he invited them, one Sunday morning, to visit it. Emmy had arrived in the city on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, in order that no time might be lost, she had copied from a daily paper a long list of advertisers desiring stenographers, and had started out to call on them. Her unfamiliarity with the town made it slow work at first, and the lack of progress she made rather discouraged her. It was her intention, if pos sible, to secure a position with some large and prominent house, or at least with a firm whose busi ness, judging from its surroundings, was a prosper ous one. Such houses, however, did not, it seemed, advertise for stenographers. Those offices to which she went were mostly small, insignificant-looking places in second-rate buildings. One housed a theatrical man, whose sole stock-in-trade appeared to lie a battered typewriter and a huge stack of photographs of stage celebrities. He told Emmy he was a press agent, and invited her to go to a show. Another proved to be a small hardware store, the proprietor of which wanted her to wait on customers while not busy 'at her machine. Still another was the office of an insurance company, where scores of girls were employed on routine work in a huge room, and the clatter of machines was deafening. At almost all the places she was asked for references, and when she said she had no previous experience her questioners seemed to lose interest in her. She had counted on her personal charm to assist her, but most of the men she saw were apparently too busy to notice whether she was tall or short, black or white. Those who did, made eyes at her and invited her to lunch, or dinner. One young fellow, in a small office on the top floor of a downtown sky scraper, on whose door appeared only the legend, “Timber Lands,” promptly asked her to marry him and thus save needless expense on both their parts. 3 Copyright. 19H. Lv tb*» c *ar Co.