“’Michelin, Gelda.  Telephone Bryant 4759.  Brunette.  Medium build.  Good neck and eyes.  Good figure.  Good clothes.’”

He glanced up.  “Well?”

“That’s me,” said Miss Michelin calmly.  “I’ve got the same telephone number and eyes and neck and clothes.  Of course my hair is different and I am thinner, but that’s business.  I’d like to know what chance a fat girl would have in the chorus these days.”

Von Herman groaned.  “I’ll pay you for the time you’ve waited and for your trouble.  Can’t use you for these pictures.”  Then as she left he turned a comically despairing face to the two men at the drawing boards.  “What are we going to do?  We’ve got to make a start on these pictures and everything has gone wrong.  They want something special.  Two figures, young man and woman.  Said expressly they didn’t want a chicken.  No romping curls and none of that eyes and lips fool-girl stuff.  This chap’s ideal for the man.”  He pointed to Jock.

Jock had been staring, fascinated, at the shaded, zigzag marks which the artist—­dark-skinned, velvet-eyed, foreign-looking youth—­was making on the sheet of paper before him.  He had scarcely glanced up during the entire scene.  Now he looked briefly and coolly at Jock.

“Where did you get him?” he asked, with the precise enunciation of the foreign-born.  “Good figure.  And he wears his clothes not like a cab driver, as the others do.”

“Thanks,” drawled Jock, flushing a little.  Then, boyish curiosity getting the better of him, “Say, tell me, what in the world are you doing to that drawing?”

He of the velvety eyes smiled a twisted little smile.  His slim brown fingers never stopped in their work of guiding the pen in its zigzag path.

“It is work,” he sneered, “to delight the soul of an artist.  I am now engaged in the pleasing task of putting the bones in a herringbone suit.”

But Jock did not smile.  Here was another man, he thought, who had been given a broom and told to sweep down the stairway.

Von Herman was regarding him almost wistfully.  “I hate to let you slip,” he said.  Then, his face brightening, “By Jove!  I wonder if Miss Galt would pose for us if we told her what a fix we were in.”

He picked up the telephone receiver.  “Miss Galt, please,” he said.  Then, aside, “Of course it’s nerve to ask a girl who’s earning three thousand a year to leave her desk and come up and pose for—­Hello!  Miss Galt?”

Jock, seated on the edge of the models’ platform, was beginning to enjoy himself.  Even this end of the advertising business had its interesting side, he thought.  Ten minutes later he knew it had.

Ten minutes later there appeared Miss Galt.  Jock left off swinging his legs from the platform and stood up.  Miss Galt was that kind of girl.  Smooth black hair parted and coiled low as only an exquisitely shaped head can dare to wear its glory-crown.  A face whose expression was sweetly serious in spite of its youth.  A girl whose clothes were the sort of clothes that girls ought to wear in offices, and don’t.