“Like a lynx!” answered Sadie.

“Anything?”

“Not a thing.  I guess they just scraped acquaintance in the Alley after dinner, like they sometimes do.  A man with eyelashes like his always speaks to any woman alone who isn’t pockmarked and toothless.  Two minutes after he’s met a girl his voice takes on the ’cello note.  I know his kind.  Why, say, he even tried waving those eyelashes of his at me first time he turned in his key; and goodness knows I’m so homely that pretty soon I’ll be ripe for bachelor floor thirteen.  You know as well as I that to qualify for that job a floor clerk’s got to look like a gargoyle.”

“Maybe they’re all right,” said Donahue thoughtfully.  “If it’s just a flirtation, why—­anyway, watch ’em this evening.  The day watch listened in and says they’ve made some date for to-night.”

He was off down the hall again with his light, quick step that still had the appearance of leisureliness.

The telephone at Sadie’s right buzzed warningly.  Sadie picked up the receiver and plunged into the busiest half hour of the evening.  From that moment until seven o’clock her nimble fingers and eyes and brain and tongue directed the steps of her little world.  She held the telephone receiver at one ear and listened to the demands of incoming and outgoing guests with the other.  She jotted down reports, dealt out mail and room-keys, kept her neuralgic eye on stairs and elevators and halls, her sound orb on tube and pantry signals, while through and between and above all she guided the stream of humanity that trickled past her desk—­bellhops, Polish chambermaids, messenger boys, guests, waiters, parlour maids.

Just before seven there disembarked at floor two out of the cream-and-gold elevator one of those visions that have helped to make Fifth Avenue a street of the worst-dressed women in the world.  The vision was Two-eighteen, and her clothes were of the kind that prepared you for the shock that you got when you looked at her face.  Plume met fur, and fur met silk, and silk met lace, and lace met gold—­and the whole met and ran into a riot of colour, and perfume—­and little jangling, swishing sounds.  Just by glancing at Two-eighteen’s feet in their inadequate openwork silk and soft kid you knew that Two-eighteen’s lips would be carmined.

She came down the corridor and stopped at Sadie Corn’s desk.  Sadie Corn had her key ready for her.  Two-eighteen took it daintily between white-gloved fingers.

“I’ll want a maid in fifteen minutes,” she said.  “Tell them to send me the one I had yesterday.  The pretty one.  She isn’t so clumsy as some.”

Sadie Corn jotted down a note without looking up.

“Oh, Julia?  Sorry—­Julia’s busy,” she lied.

Two-eighteen knew she lied, because at that moment there came round the bend in the broad, marble stairway that led up from the parlour floor the trim, slim figure of Julia herself.