Rita was not at home when Valerie came into their little apartment: the parrot greeted her, shrieking from his perch

Charles Dana Gibson's pen-and-ink plate depicts a fashionably dressed young woman—hat broad-brimmed and tilted, skirt cut in the severe vertical lines of 1911 tailoring—pausing mid-room with one gloved hand raised to her chin. A macaw on a floor-standing perch addresses her from the left; a rumpled daybed, a book lying open on its coverlet, and a framed figure-print on the wall complete the cramped apartment interior. No caption survives beyond the illustrative title. The scene belongs to Gibson's serial domestic comedies of independent urban women: two young women sharing lodgings, one absent, the parrot standing in for human welcome. The mild joke turns on bachelor-girl bohemia—modern, slightly precarious—presented with the magazine's characteristic sympathy rather than censure. No ethnic caricature is present.