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me."
                    "It's beautiful," Helen said wistfully.
                    "Isn't it, though?" Patrice agreed. "See? It has our names, together, around it on the inside. Isn't that a cute idea? Keep it on your finger for me a minute, that's the safest."
                    "Isn't it supposed to be bad luck to do that? I mean, for you to take it off, and for me to put it on?"
                    Patrice tossed her head vaingloriously. "I couldn't have bad luck," she proclaimed. It was almost a challenge.
                    "And I," thought Helen somberly, "couldn't have good."
                    She watched it curiously as it slowly descended the length of her finger, easily, without forcing. There was a curiously familiar feeling to it, as of something that should have been there long ago, that belonged there and had been strangely lacking until now.
                    "So this is what it feels like," she said to herself poignantly.
                    The train pounded on, its headlong roar deadened, in here where they were, to a muted jittering.
                    Patrice stepped back, her toilette at last completed. "Well, this is my last night," she sighed. "By this time tomorrow night we'll already be there, the worst'll be over." She clasped her own arms, in a sort of half-shiver of fright. "I hope they like what they're getting." She nervously stole a sidelong look at herself in the glass, primped at her hair.
                    "You'll be all right, Patrice," Helen reassured her quietly. "Nobody could help but like you."
                    Patrice crossed her fingers and held them up to show her. "Hugh says they're very well-off," she rambled on. "That makes it all the worse sometimes." She tittered in recollection. "I guess they must be. I know they even had to send us the money for the trip home. We were always on a shoestring, the whole time we were over there. We had an awful lot of fun, though. I think that's the only time you have fun, when you're on a shoestring, don't you?"
                    "Sometimes--you don't," remembered Helen, but she didn't answer.
                    "Anyway," her confidante babbled on, "as soon as they found out I was Expecting, that did it! They wouldn't hear of my having my baby over there. I didn't much want to myself, as a matter of fact, and Hugh didn't want me to either. They should be born in the good old U.S.A., don't you think so? That's the least you can do for them."
                    "Sometimes that's all you can do for them," Helen thought wryly. "That--and seventeen cents."
                    She had finished now in turn.
                    Patrice urged, "Let's stay in here long enough to have a puff, now that we're here. We don't seem to be keeping anybody else out. And if we try to talk out there, they might shush us down; they're all trying to sleep." The little lighter-flame winked in coppery reflection against the mirrors and glistening chrome on all sides of them. She gave a sigh of heartfelt satisfaction. "I love these before-retiring talks with another girl. It's been ages since I last had one. Back in school, I guess. Hugh says I'm a woman's woman at heart." She stopped short and thought about it with a quizzical quirk of her head. "Is that good or bad? I must ask him."
                    Helen couldn't repress a smile. "Good, I guess. I wouldn't want to be a man's woman."
                    "I wouldn't either!" Patrice hastily concurred. "It always makes me think of someone who uses foul language and spits out of the corner of her mouth."
                    They both chuckled for a moment in unison. But Patrice's butterflymind had already fluttered on to the next topic, as she dropped ash into the