One kindly hand on the woman’s arm, Martha Foote performed the introduction.

“This is Mrs. Anna Czarnik, late of Poland.  Widowed.  Likewise childless.  Also brotherless.  Also many other uncomfortable things.  But the life of the crowd in the scrub-girls’ quarters on the top floor.  Aren’t you, Anna?  Mrs. Anna Czarnik, I’m sorry to say, is the source of the blood-curdling moan, and the swishing, and the clanking, and the ghost-raps.  There is a service stairway just on the other side of this wall.  Anna Czarnik was performing her morning job of scrubbing it.  The swishing was her wet rag.  The clanking was her pail.  The dull raps her scrubbing brush striking the stair corner just behind your wall.”

“You’re forgetting the wail,” Geisha McCoy suggested, icily.

“No, I’m not.  The wail, I’m afraid, was Anna Czarnik, singing.”

“Singing?”

Martha Foote turned and spoke a gibberish of Polish and English to the bewildered woman at her side.  Anna Czarnik’s dull face lighted up ever so little.

“She says the thing she was singing is a Polish folk-song about death and sorrow, and it’s called a—­what was that, Anna?”

“Dumka.”

“It’s called a dumka.  It’s a song of mourning, you see?  Of grief.  And of bitterness against the invaders who have laid her country bare.”

“Well, what’s the idea!” demanded Geisha McCoy.  “What kind of a hotel is this, anyway?  Scrub-girls waking people up in the middle of the night with a Polish cabaret.  If she wants to sing her hymn of hate why does she have to pick on me!”

“I’m sorry.  You can go, Anna.  No sing, remember!  Sh-sh-sh!”

Anna Czarnik nodded and made her unwieldy escape.

Geisha McCoy waved a hand at the mulatto maid.  “Go to your room, Blanche.  I’ll ring when I need you.”  The girl vanished, gratefully, without a backward glance at the disorderly room.  Martha Foote felt herself dismissed, too.  And yet she made no move to go.  She stood there, in the middle of the room, and every housekeeper inch of her yearned to tidy the chaos all about her, and every sympathetic impulse urged her to comfort the nerve-tortured woman before her.  Something of this must have shone in her face, for Geisha McCoy’s tone was half-pettish, half-apologetic as she spoke.

“You’ve no business allowing things like that, you know.  My nerves are all shot to pieces anyway.  But even if they weren’t, who could stand that kind of torture?  A woman like that ought to lose her job for that.  One word from me at the office and she—­”

“Don’t say it, then,” interrupted Martha Foote, and came over to the bed.  Mechanically her fingers straightened the tumbled covers, removed a jumble of magazines, flicked away the crumbs.  “I’m sorry you were disturbed.  The scrubbing can’t be helped, of course, but there is a rule against unnecessary noise, and she shouldn’t have been singing.  But—­well, I suppose she’s got to find relief, somehow.  Would you believe that woman is the cut-up of the top floor?  She’s a natural comedian, and she does more for me in the way of keeping the other girls happy and satisfied than—­”