The Girl in the Crowd

                      by Albert Payson Terhune


Stretch an invisible cord knee-high across the sidewalk at Broadway
and Forty-second Street, and in five minutes a hundred prettier
girls than Daisy Reynolds will stumble over it. (A hundred homelier
girls too, for that matter!)

Daisy was just the Girl in the Crowd. Look down the aisle of your
subway- or surface- or L-car on the way home to-night, and you will
see her. You will see her by the dozen.

But you will not observe her, unless you look hard. She is not the
type of girl to make you murmur fatuously: “Gee, but I wish she was
_my_ stenographer!” Nor is she the sort that excites pity for her
plainness. She is--yes, my term “the Girl in the Crowd” best fits
her.

For three years, after she left high school, Daisy occupied
twenty-eight inches of space along one of the two sides of a room
whose walls were wainscoted in honeycombed metal. At shelves in
front of the honeycombing sat double lines of girls with ugly steel
appliances over their frizzed or lanky hair. Their hands were ever
flitting from spot to spot in the perforated wainscoting, deftly
shifting plugs from hole to hole.

An excrescence, like a misshapen black-rubber lily, jutted forth
from the wall facing each girl. Into these lily-mouths the damsels
were wont to croon such airy sentiments as these:

“Schuyler 9051 don’t answer. --Yes, I’m ringing Aud’bon
2973. --Beekman 4000 is busy. --I’ll give you Inf’ma-tion. --’Xcuse
it, please. --No’m, _I_ didn’t cut you off. What number was you
talking to? --Schuyler 4789 is still busy. --It’s just
twelve-forty-two, by the c’rect time. --Number, please.”

Up and down the double rank marched a horribly efficient woman who
discouraged repartee and inter-desk conversation. The long room
buzzed with the rhythmic droning of fifty voices and with the
purring of countless plugs clicked into innumerable sockets.

To end, once and for all, the killing suspense, the room wherein
Daisy Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business
career was a telephone exchange.

And at the three years’ end, she was assigned to the job of
day-operator at the Clavichord Arms.


The pay at the hotel was no larger than at the exchange; but there
was always the possibility of tips, and the certainty of
Christmas-money. Besides, there were chances to rest or to read
between calls. On the whole, Daisy rejoiced at the change--as might
a private who is made corporal.

The Clavichord Arms is a glorious monument to New York’s efforts at
boosting the high cost of living. The building occupies nearly a
third of a city block, in length and depth, and it towers to the
height of nine stories. Its facade and main entrance and
cathedral-like lobby are rare samples of an architecture whose
sacred motto is, “Put all your goods in the show-window.”

When the high cost of living first menaced our suffering land,
scores of such apartment-houses sprang into life, in order that New
Yorkers might do their bit toward the upkeep of high prices. Here,
at a rental ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a
year, one may live in quarters almost as commodious as those for
which a suburbanite or smaller city’s dweller pays fifty dollars a
month.

And nobly did New York rally to the aid of the men who sought thus
to get its coin. So quickly did the new apartments fill with tenants
that more and yet more and more such buildings were run up.

Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five
to six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for
the privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they
sneered at humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room
mansions in the suburbs.

And this, by prosy degrees, brings us back to Daisy Reynolds.


The Clavichord Arms’ interior decorator had used up all his
ingenuity and his appropriation before he came to the cubby-hole
behind the gilded elevators--the cubby-hole that served as the
telephone-operator’s quarters. The cubby-hole was airless,
windowless, low and sloped of ceiling, calcimined of wall, and
equipped with no furniture at all except the switchboard-desk, a
single kitchen chair, one eight-candle-power electric light and an
iron clothes-hook.

Here, for eight hours a day, sat Daisy Reynolds. Here, with stolid
conscientiousness, she manipulated the plugs, that the building’s
seventy tenants might waste their own and their friends’ time in
endless phone-chats.

It was dull and uninspiring and lonely in the dark cubby-hole, after
the lights and the constant work and companionship of the Exchange.
There was much more leisure, too, than at the Exchange.

Daisy at first tried to enliven this leisure by reading. She loved
to read; book or magazine--it was all the same to Daisy, so long as
the hero and heroine at last outwitted the villain and came together
at the altar.

But there are drawbacks to reading all day--even to reading
union-made love stories, by eight-candle-power light and with
everlasting interruption from the switchboard. So Daisy, by way of
amusement, began to “listen in.”

“Listening in” is a plug-shifting process whereby the
telephone-operator may hear any conversation over the wire. In some
States, I understand, it is a misdemeanor. But perhaps there is no
living operator who has not done it. In some private exchanges it is
so common a custom that the cry of “Fish!” warns every other
operator in the room that a particularly listenable talk is going
on. This same cry of “Fish” is an invitation for all present to
listen in.

(Yes, your telephonic love-talk, your fierce love-spats and your
sacredest love-secrets have been avidly heard--and possibly
repeated--again and again, by Central. Remember that, next time.
When you hear a faint click on the wire during your
conversation,--and sometimes when you don’t,--an operator is pretty
certain to be listening in.)

At first Daisy was amused by what she heard. The parsimonious
butcher-order of the house’s richest woman, the hiccoughed excuses
of a husband whom business detained downtown, the vapid chatter of
lad and lass, the scolding of slow dressmakers, the spicy anecdotes
told by half-hour phone-gabblers--all these were a pleasant
variation on the day’s routine. But at last, they began to pall. And
just as they waxed tiresome--romance began.


The voice in Apartment 60--a clear voice, girlish and
vibrant--called up 9999-Z Worth. And Worth 9999-Z replied in a tone
that fairly throbbed with eager longing. That was the beginning.
Shamelessly--soon rapturously--Daisy Reynolds listened in.

The voice in Apartment 60 belonged to a girl named Madeline. And
Worth 9999-Z (whose first name, by the way, was Karl) spoke that
foreign-sounding name _Madeline_ as though it were a phrase of
hauntingly sweet church music. He and Madeline had known each other,
it appeared, for some months; but only recently had they made the
divine discovery of their mutual love. It was then that the phone
talks had begun--the talks that varied in number from three to seven
a day, and in length from three to thirty minutes.

Always, now, promptly at nine o’clock in the morning, Karl called up
his sweetheart. And always, an hour or so later, she called him up
for a return-dialogue. Their talk was not mushy; it was beautiful.
It thrilled with a love as deathless as the stars, a love through
whose longing ran a current of unhappiness that Daisy could not
understand.

Daisy grew to live for those talks. They became part of her very
life--the loveliest part. She was curt, almost snappish, when other
calls interfered with the bliss of listening-in. More than once she
shamelessly broke off the connection when Madeline chanced to be
talking to some old bore at a time when Karl sought to speak to her.

Karl, it seemed, was a downtown business man. As scientists
reconstruct an entire fossil animal from a single bone of its left
hind leg, so Daisy Reynolds built up a vision of Karl from his deep
and powerful voice. He was tall, slender, graceful, yet broad of
shoulder and deep of chest. Brown curls crisped above his white
Greek forehead. His eyes were somber yet glowing. His age was from
twenty-eight to thirty. He dressed like a collar advertisement.

Madeline was still easier to reconstruct, from her voice. She too
was tall. She was willowy and infinitely graceful--gold-brown of
hair, dark blue of eye, with soft-molded little features and long
jetty lashes. With such a voice, she could not have been otherwise.

Daisy gathered from their earlier talks that Madeline’s family
disapproved the match. She even learned, from something Karl said,
that there was another suitor--one Phil--on whom the family smiled
and whom Madeline cordially detested. Once or twice, too, Phil
called up Apartment 60. He had a husky voice and spoke brief
commonplaces. Madeline answered him listlessly and still more
briefly. But he seldom phoned to her. And she never, by any chance,
phoned to him.


So the ardent, tenderly melancholy love-story wore on. The lovers
would make appointments for clandestine meetings--would speak in
joyous retrospect of luncheons or motor-drives of the preceding day.
Evidently, Madeline’s cruel family kept stern watch upon her
movements. Daisy used to smile in joyous approval at the girl’s
dainty cleverness in outmaneuvering them and meeting her sweetheart.

Ever through the glory of their love ran that black thread of
melancholy. Apparently all the glad secret meetings and the adoring
phone-talks could not make up to them for the family’s opposition.
Daisy had to bite her lips, sometimes, to keep from breaking in on
the conversation and demanding:

“Why don’t you two run off and get married? They’d have to come
around, then. And if they didn’t, why should you care?”

To a girl cooped up alone all day in a stuffy cubby-hole,
imagination is ten times stronger than to the girl whose thoughts
can be distracted by outside things. To Daisy, immured in her
dim-lighted cupboard behind the elevators, this romance of Karl and
Madeline was fast becoming the very biggest thing in her drab life.

These two lovers were as romantic, as poetical, as yearningly
adoring as _Romeo_ and _Juliet_. Karl was as desperately jealous as
_Othello_ or as the hero of one of Laura Jean Libbey’s greatest
books. Madeline was _the Captive Maid_ come to life again. Oh, it
was all very, very wonderful!

Then came the day of jarring disillusionment, a day which Daisy
followed by sobbing until midnight on her none-too-soft
boarding-house bed, three blocks to westward.


Promptly at nine that morning, as usual, Karl called up Apartment
60.

“Sweetheart,” he joyfully hailed Madeline, “I’ve just bought the new
car. It’s a beauty. And you’re going to be the very first person to
ride in it--to consecrate it.”

“That’s darling of you!” replied Madeline in evident delight. “I’d
rather ride in a wheelbarrow with you than in a Rolls-Royce
with--with--”

“With Phil?” asked Karl almost savagely.

“With anybody,” she evaded. “Tell me more about the car. Is it--”

“I’m not going to tell you,” he refused. “I’m going to show it to
you instead. Here’s my idea: I’ll knock off work at noon and bring
the car uptown. I’ll meet you at the subway kiosk at half-after
twelve; we can run up to the Arrowhead to lunch, and then on up to
the Tumble Inn for--”

“But I can’t, dear--I _can’t_!” expostulated Madeline. “Don’t you
remember? I told you I have to lunch with Phil and those people from
Buffalo, at the Knickerbocker, at one o’clock. Oh, dear! I wish I
didn’t have to. But I--”

“Phone him you’re sick,” urged Karl. “I’ve set my heart on
christening the new car this way.”

“I could get away to-morrow--” she began.

“But _I_ can’t,” he said. “I’ve a directors’ meeting at three. Oh,
come along to-day, Beautiful! Tell Phil you’re sick and--”

“And have him come rushing up here, in a fidget, for fear I’m going
to die?” she suggested. “That is just what Phil would do. No, dear,
I--”

“Then tell him you don’t _want_ to lunch with him,” urged Karl,
losing patience as a man will when some babyishly cherished
woman-plan of his is upset. “Tell him you have to go to your
sister’s or--”

“I can’t, Karl!” she declared; and she added, beseechingly: “Don’t
be unreasonable, dear boy. Please don’t. And don’t be cross; it
makes me so unhappy when you are. You know how hard I try to do
everything you want me to--and how glad I am to. But I _can’t_ get
out of this luncheon. Phil especially wants me to be there. These
Buffalo people are old friends of his.”

“Why should you have to go there, just because he wants you to?”
demanded Karl, far more crankily than ever Daisy had heard him
speak. “Why do you? You aren’t his slave.”

“No,” returned Madeline, her own temper beginning to fray, “but I am
his _wife_. You seem to forget that.”

“I don’t forget it half as often as _you_ do!” flashed Karl.

At which brutally truthful reply, the receiver of Apartment 60’s
wire clanked down upon its hook. Nor could all of Karl’s repeated
efforts bring Madeline back to the telephone.


Daisy Reynolds slumped forward upon the switchboard desk, her face
in her hands, her slim body a-shake. She felt as though her every
nerve had been wrenched. She was sick all over. This, then, was the
wondrous romance in which she had reveled. This was the melancholy,
beauteous love-story which had become part of her own colorless
life! A vulgar intrigue between a married woman (not a wife, but a
married woman--Daisy now realized the difference between the two)
and a man not her husband!

The iridescent bubbles of romance burst into thinnest air. Daisy was
numb with the horror and disgust of it all. Even of old she had
fastidiously refused to listen in when another girl’s merry cry of
“Fish!” had told that some such illicit dialogue was on the wire.
And now, for weeks, she had been raptly listening to just such
talks.

She loathed herself for the silly bubbles she had blown. Their
lovely sheen was miasmic slime. They were filled with foul gases. A
great shame possessed Daisy Reynolds.

Next morning Daisy came to work swollen-eyed from futile crying over
the death of her dreams, and dull-headed from too little sleep. Half
an hour later, promptly at nine, Karl called up Apartment 60.

Daisy’s hand trembled as she made the connection. She hated herself
for listening in. Yet from morbid fascination she did it.

“Darling!” was Karl’s remorsefully passionate greeting as Madeline
answered the phone-bell’s summons. “I’m so sorry! So horribly sorry!
I spoke rottenly to you yesterday. Wont you forgive me? _Please_
do!”

“Please don’t let us speak about it,” began Madeline stiffly.

Then her shell of offendedness collapsed, and she went on with a
break in her sweet voice.

“Oh, I’m so glad you called up! I was so afraid you wouldn’t. And I
was going to try so hard not to phone to you. But I knew I’d do
it--I _knew_ I would--if you didn’t call me first. I’ve been
terribly unhappy, dear.”

“You’ve had nothing on me, in that,” he made answer. “I haven’t
slept all night, thinking how I spoke to you. It was our first
quarrel. And it was all my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” she contradicted chokily. “It was all mine. I shouldn’t
have been hurt by what you said about my forgetting so often that--”

“Don’t, dear,” he begged. “Don’t! It was a rotten thing for me to
say.”

“It was--it was true,” she replied, her voice quavering as she
fought back the tears. “But you told me yourself that you don’t
blame me. You know what my life with him has been, from the very
beginning. And till I met you I used to wish I were dead. Oh, you
_can’t_ blame me for forgetting him, for--for _you_!”

“You’re an angel!” he declared. “I’m not fit to touch your hand. But
my love for you is the only thing there is in my life. And it’s
brought me the only happiness I ever knew. I used to think I’d like
to kill myself if it weren’t for my mother. And now you’ve given me
something--everything--to live for. I love you so, Madeline! Are you
sure you’ve forgiven me?”

“_Forgiven_ you?” she echoed. “Why, Karl, I _love_ you.”

Yes, the reply was banal enough. But the tone was not, nor was the
wordless exclamation of worship with which Karl received it. And to
her own self-disgust Daisy felt a stir of answering emotion in her
own breast.

Just then she was required to connect Apartment 42 with the market,
and at once afterward to put through a long-distance call for the
building’s superintendent. And when next she sought to listen in,
Karl and Madeline were finishing their talk. All Daisy could catch
was Madeline’s childish query:

“Can’t we please try out the new car to-morrow, if the directors’
meeting is going to keep you this afternoon?”

And he answered gayly:

“To blue blazes with the directors! We’re going to Tumble Inn
to-day, you and I, sweetheart--even if New York doesn’t get a stroke
of business done south of Canal Street all afternoon. Good-by.
You’ll be sure to call me up later, wont you?”


Daisy sat back in her wabbly chair to take mental account of stock.

She was amazed at herself--amazed, and a bit displeased, though not
as much so as she could have wished. All her ideas and ideals seemed
to be as wabbly as the kitchen chair she sat in. Womanlike, she
straightway began to justify herself. True, an hour earlier, she had
been filled with contempt for these two. Equally true, she was now
irresistibly drawn to them again--which most certainly called for a
reason; so she supplied the reason:

Madeline had been forced into a marriage, in mere childhood, with a
man she did not love. And had she not said, “You know what my life
with him has been, from the very beginning?” That alone told the
story--the heartbreaking story of neglected wifehood, of
ill-treatment, of a starved soul.

Who was Daisy to blame this pathetic young wife if she had at last
let love into her heart after years of bondage to a brute? Daisy
recalled Phil’s husky voice. From it she built up a physique that
was a blend of _Simon Legree’s_ and _Falstaff’s_, with a tinge of
_Bill Sikes_. And, her moral sense deserting her, she realized that
right or wrong she was steadfastly on the side of the lovers.

During the days that followed, she listened in again, with all her
old-time hero-and-heroine-worship. Now she understood the strain of
melancholy in these two people’s love. It was the hopelessness of
that love which made them so sad, in the midst of their stolen
happiness.

Once, in a free moment, Daisy slipped from her cubby-hole and into
the superintendent’s office, to ask for a stronger light-bulb. There
on the wall hung a typed list of the house’s tenants. Stealing a
glance at it while the superintendent’s back was turned, Daisy ran
her eye down the list until she came to the number she wanted:

Apartment 60--Mr. and Mrs. Philip Caleb Vanbrugh.

_Caleb!_ Yes, that was the sort of middle name her ugly-tempered
clod of a husband would have been likely to own. The names
_Madeline_ and _Caleb_ could no more blend than could violets and
prunes. Doubly, now, Daisy’s heart was with the lovers.

One qualm, only, marred her sympathy. From the fact that Karl always
spoke of Vanbrugh by his first name, the men apparently were
friends. And to woo one’s friend’s wife is black vileness. Even
Daisy knew that. So she readjusted matters in her elastic mind, and
decided the men were merely close business acquaintances, and that
friendship did not enter into their relations. Daisy felt better
about it, after that--much better.


One morning when Daisy connected the wire for the lovers and
prepared for her daily feast of listening in, a sharp whir from
another apartment in the house drew her back to earth. In her
nervous haste to make the new connection and get back to her
listening, she awkwardly knocked out a plug or two. Absent-mindedly
she readjusted them, trying meantime to catch what the second caller
was trying to say to her.

This caller was a fussy woman in Apartment 12, who first wanted to
know the correct time and then asked for a wire to Philadelphia. A
full minute elapsed before Daisy could get back to the lovers. And
as she turned again to their talk, she realized with a guilty start
that in the mix-up of the various plugs she had left the switch
open.

Have you ever called up a telephone number and been let in on a
conversation already going on between the person you called up and
somebody else? It gives one an absurdly guilty feeling. And it means
the switch has carelessly been left open, so that anybody calling up
can tap the wire. That is the condition in which Daisy had chanced
to leave the switch to Apartment 60. Eagerly she stretched forth her
hand to repair the error. As she did so, three sentences struck her
ear. They were spoken in quick succession by three people--as
follows:

“Good-by, darling,” said Karl. “I’ll be there at one.”

“Good-by, boy dear,” answered Madeline. “I’ll call you up again
before then.”

“Who in hell are _you_?” bellowed a third and huskier voice. “And
what do you mean by calling my wife darling?”

_Click!_ All three wires were shut off by one lightning swirl of
Daisy’s fingers.


She sat aghast. The third voice had most assuredly been
Phil’s--Philip Caleb Vanbrugh’s. What had she done? What _hadn’t_
she done? Then she became aware of a buzzing call.

“Clavichord Arms,” she said primly in reply as she sought to rally
her shaky nerves.

“That the house operator?” harshly demanded the husky voice. “I
called up my apartment--Apartment 60--a minute ago, and my wife was
talking over the phone. What number was she talking to?”

“What apartment did you say?” asked Daisy.

“Sixty!”

“Apartment 60 hasn’t had a call this morning,” solemnly answered
Daisy, her throat tightening under the grip of outraged conscience.
“Nor it hasn’t sent in one, either.”

“I’d swear that was my wife’s voice,” growled the man. “I couldn’t
place the man’s. But it was my wife’s, all right. And--”

“It may ’a’ been Sarah Bernhardt’s voice, for all I know,” snapped
Daisy. “But it didn’t come from Apartment 60. Not any calls have
been turned in from there since I came on.”

“You’re sure?” he asked in sour doubt.

“You can look at my slip here on the desk,” pertly retorted Daisy.
“All the calls are marked on that.”

“No,” said the man slowly, “I wont do that--because, if you’ve lied,
you wouldn’t be past altering the slip. What I’m going to do is to
ask the building’s superintendent for an itemized list of all the
calls from my apartment for the past month or two. He’s obliged to
furnish it on demand. That ought to tell me something.”


He hung up. Daisy sat gasping. Before her mental gaze ranged the
memory of forty-odd calls a month to Worth 9999-Z. Then she came to
a decision. Out into the marble-lined hallway she went. There she
corralled the second elevator-boy and bribed him with twenty-five
cents to take charge of the switchboard for a few minutes. A moment
or so later, a colored maid was ushering her into Apartment 60.

In the middle of a garish living-room stood Daisy, trying
desperately to think straight. The curtains parted, and a woman came
into the room. Daisy blinked at her in bewilderment--then said:

“I should like to speak to Mrs. Vanbrugh, please. It’s very
important.”

“I’m Mrs. Vanbrugh,” answered the woman, eying the girl with
curiosity.

“I--I mean Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh,” faltered the girl.

“I am Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh,” was the answer, and now Daisy
recognized the voice, “--Mrs. Philip C. Vanbrugh. What can I do for
you?”

Daisy could not answer at once. Around her dumfounded head the
bubbles were bursting like a myriad Roman-candle balls.

This woman framed in the doorway was Madeline--_her_ Madeline? This
woman whose dumpy figure was swathed in a bedraggled negligee that
had once been clean! This woman whose scalp was haloed by a crescent
of kid-curlers that held in hard lumps her brass-hued front hair!
This woman with the hard, light eyes and sagging mouth-lines and
beaklike nose--this woman whose face was sallow and coarse, because
it had not yet received its daily dress of make-up! This--_this_ was
Madeline!

“What can I do for you?” the woman was saying for the second time,
her early air of curiosity merging into one of dawning hostility.

“I am the switchboard operator downstairs,” said Daisy faintly.


A look of terror that had all along lurked in the hard eyes now
sprang to new light.

“What do you want of me?”

“I want to tell you your husband heard the last part of your
phone-talk just now,” returned Daisy conscientiously, though her
heart was no longer in her mission of rescue. “He called me up about
it. I--”

“You told him?” blithered the woman in panic.

“I told him your apartment hadn’t had a call all morning.”

“You _did_?” cried the woman, her sweet voice sharpening to a
peacock screech of relief. “Good for you! Good for _you_! And you
were perfectly right to come directly up here for your pay. What do
you think would be fair reward? Don’t be afraid to say. You’ve done
me a great service, and--”

“I don’t understand you,” stammered Daisy. “I don’t understand you
at all. If you think I did this for money--”

“My dear,” laughed the woman nervously, “we do everything for money.
So you needn’t be ashamed. We don’t always _say_ it’s for money. But
it is. That’s why I got into this scrape. My husband is the
stingiest man in New York. He pretends his business is on such a
ragged edge that he can’t give me any extra cash. But I know better.
That’s why I let myself get interested in Mr. Schreiner. He is a
widower, and he has more money than he can--”

“Oh!” cried Daisy in sick horror.

“So he’ll make it good to you for all that you’ve done for us,”
prattled on the woman, without noticing. “He’ll--”

“That isn’t why I came up here!” broke in Daisy angrily. “And I
don’t want your filthy money, either. I wont touch it. I came up
here to warn you that your husband is going to--”


The buzz of the flat’s front-door bell interrupted her. The woman,
too, turned nervously to look. They heard the maid fumble with the
knob. Then some one brushed past the servant and into the
living-room.

The intruder was a chunky and yellowish man, of late middle
years--incredibly bald of head and suspiciously black of eyebrows.
He caught sight of Mrs. Vanbrugh, who chanced to be standing between
him and Daisy. And he exclaimed:

“I jumped into a taxi and hustled here, as soon as I left the phone.
I didn’t dare call up again. Do you suppose he recognized me?”

Yes, the voice was indubitably the voice of Karl. But the fat and
elderly swain was in anything but a loverly mood. He was a-quake
with terror. Beads of sweat trickled down on his brows and mustache.
His yellowish complexion was blotchy from fear. He was not a pretty
sight.

Daisy by this time should have been past surprise. Yet her
preconceived vision of Karl--of young, athletic, hero-featured
Karl--died hard and in much and sudden pain. Poor Daisy! Until he
spoke, she had mistaken him for the husband.

“If he knew my voice,” babbled the man, “we’re up against it. I’d
better get out of town for a while, I suppose. Maybe he--”

“Don’t worry!” interposed Madeline acidly. “You wont have to run
away from town and leave me to face it all. This girl has gotten us
out of it. She is the operator downstairs. Phil called up and asked
her all sorts of questions. And she told him the apartment hadn’t
had a call all morning. Isn’t she a brick?”

A sound like the exhaust of an empty soda-siphon broke from between
Karl’s puffy lips--a sound of pure if porcine reaction from dread.

“Good girl!” he croaked, still hoarse with recent fright. “_Dandy_
girl!”

He sought to pat Daisy approvingly on the shoulder with one pudgy
hand. She recoiled.

“How much?” he asked jovially, not observing the stark repulsion in
her face and gesture as she shrank away. “How much, little girl?
You’ve done a mighty big stroke of business this day. What do you
say I owe you? Or will you leave it to me to do the right thing by
you?”

He juggled a bloated wad of bills from his trousers pocket as he
spoke. And at his motion something in Daisy’s taut brain seemed to
snap.


The girl did not “see red.” She saw only two fat and greasy
creatures who thought she was as vile as they--who took it for
granted that she had done this thing to extort a rich tip from them,
for covering up their sin. And wrath gave her back her momentarily
lost power of speech.

“_Oh!_” she cried in utter loathing, “you’d dare _pay_ me for trying
to help you? If I’d known what you both are, all the money in New
York wouldn’t have gotten me to lift a finger for you. You
horrible--”

“There, there, my dear!” oilily soothed Karl. “You’re a little bit
excited. Calm down and tell us how much--”

“If you don’t want pay,” shrilled Madeline, “what did you come here
for?”

“What did I come here for?” echoed Daisy, white with rage. “To make
a fool of myself, of course. To warn you that your husband is going
to get the call-lists for the past month from the super, and find
out from them what numbers you’ve been calling up. That’s--”

“Good Lord!” gabbled the woman in crass horror.

Karl’s fat jaw dropped upon his fatter throat. He tried to speak. He
could only gargle.

“That’s why I came here!” finished Daisy, striding past them toward
the door. “To warn you. And now I’ve done it. Your husband’s liable
to be streaking back home any minute now. And I’m going. And if
either of you says any more about money, I’ll--”

She was making for the outer door. But for all her start, Karl
reached it three lengths ahead of her. He banged it shut after him
as he darted out. Through the panel Daisy could hear him ringing
frantically for the elevator.

Daisy was following, when a choking sound made her turn back. The
woman still stood in the middle of the living-room. Her hard, light
eyes were dark and dilated. Her sallow face was haggard and ghastly.
Yet her features were unmoved. There was about her bearing and
expression a certain hopeless courage that lent dignity to the squat
figure.


Daisy hesitated--then turned back into the room. The woman stared
dully past her toward the doorway through which Karl had vanished.
She acknowledged the girl’s presence by muttering, in a curiously
dead voice, more to herself than to Daisy:

“Men are queer animals, aren’t they? He has sworn to me, time and
again, that he’d stand by me to the end.”

“Yes,” assented Daisy in perfect simplicity, “I’ve heard him say it
to you myself--twice.”

“He’s gone,” went on the woman in that same dead voice so unlike her
own. “He’s gone. And I’m left to hold the bag. I--I think I’m cured.
There are worse things than a husband who loves you--even if he
can’t give you all the money you want to spend. Phil would never
have run away like that, from _anything_--not that the lesson is
likely to do me any good, now.”

“Here!” exclaimed the girl, shaking the dazed Madeline roughly by
the shoulder. “I’m going to get you out of this. I don’t know why,
but I am. Maybe I’ve a bill of my own to pay, as well as you have.
We’ve all done some learning to-day, I guess. And learning isn’t on
the free-list.”

“But--”

“Go to the phone right away,” commanded Daisy, “and call up the
super. Tell him you’ve got to see him, up here, in a hurry. Act
scared. Tell him it can’t wait a single minute. Get him up here.
That’s the main thing. Then--then tell him you want new faucets in
the bathroom. Or tell him anything at all. Do as I say. Jump! There
isn’t much time to waste. Hubby’s sure to be hotfooting it home. And
when hubby comes, deny everything. _Deny!_ And keep on denying. He
wont have any proof, remember that. _He’ll have no proof._ Pay for
the lie by being a whole lot decenter to him, forever-after-amen.”


Moving away from the dumfounded woman, Daisy bolted out of the flat
and was lucky enough to catch a down-going elevator. She reached the
ground floor just as the building’s perplexed superintendent came to
the shaft on his way to answer Madeline’s urgent summons.

Into the superintendent’s deserted office sped Daisy. Going directly
to his unlocked desk, she rummaged feverishly amid its drawers until
she found what she wanted.

Crumpling and pocketing the telephone-sheets for the past two
months, she crossed to the file cabinet, hunted through a stack of
dusty papers and drew forth the sheaf of penciled telephone-slips
for the preceding year.

Selecting from these the slips for the two corresponding months, she
put back the rest of the Sheaf. Then, changing with eraser and
pencil the date of the year on the two slips she had abstracted from
the cabinet, she put them in the drawer. After which, feeling oddly
weak about the knees, she started out of the office.

At the door she almost collided with the returning superintendent.
Vexed at having been called upstairs in such haste on an utterly
trivial errand, he very naturally wreaked his ill-temper on the
first subordinate he chanced to meet--which was Daisy.

“What are you doing away from your switchboard?” he snarled. “I
won’t stand for any loafing. Get that into your mind, once and for
all. What did you want in here, anyhow?”

“I came in to see you, sir,” was the girl’s demure reply.

“What do you want of me?” he rasped.

“I wanted to tell you I’m leaving here to-morrow,” said Daisy. “I’m
going back to work at the Exchange. I’m lonesome on this job. There
aren’t enough things happening at the Clavichord Arms. It’s too
slow--not enough excitement for a live wire like me. That’s all,
sir.”


[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the October 1917 issue
of Blue Book magazine.]