“All right, all right!  I just wanted to tell you that ‘My Mistake’ closes Saturday.  The stuff’ll be up Monday morning early.”

A sardonic laugh from Josie.  “And yet they say ‘What’s in a name!’”

The unfortunate play had been all that its title implies.  Its purpose was to star an actress who hadn’t a glint.  Her second-act costume alone had cost $700, but even Russian sable bands can’t carry a bad play.  The critics had pounced on it with the savagery of their kind and hacked it, limb from limb, leaving its carcass to rot under the pitiless white glare of Broadway.  The dress with the Russian sable bands went the way of all Hahn & Lohman tragedies.  Josie Fifer received it, if not reverently, still appreciatively.

“I should think Sid Hahn would know by this time,” she observed sniffily, as her expert fingers shook out the silken folds and smoothed the fabulous fur, “that auburn hair and a gurgle and a Lucille dress don’t make a play.  Besides, Fritzi Kirke wears the biggest shoe of any actress I ever saw.  A woman with feet like that”—­she picked up a satin slipper, size 7-1/2 C—­“hasn’t any business on the stage.  She ought to travel with a circus.  Here, Etta.  Hang this away in D, next to the amethyst blue velvet, and be sure and lock the door.”

McCabe had been right.  A waspish wit was Josie’s.

The question is whether to reveal to you now where it was that Josie Fifer reigned thus, queen of the cast-offs; or to take you back to the days that led up to her being there—­the days when she was Jose Fyfer on the programme.

Her domain was the storage warehouse of Hahn & Lohman, as you may have guessed.  If your business lay Forty-third Street way, you might have passed the building a hundred times without once giving it a seeing glance.  It was not Forty-third Street of the small shops, the smart crowds, and the glittering motors.  It was the Forty-third lying east of the Grand Central sluice gates; east of fashion; east, in a word, of Fifth Avenue—­a great square brick building smoke-grimed, cobwebbed, and having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie.  Yet within it lurks Romance, and her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother Comedy, the cut-up.

A worn flight of wooden steps leads up from the sidewalk to the dim hallway; a musty-smelling passage wherein you are met by a genial sign which reads: 

“No admittance.  Keep out.  This means you.”

To confirm this, the eye, penetrating the gloom, is confronted by a great blank metal door that sheathes the elevator.  To ride in that elevator is to know adventure, so painfully, so protestingly, with such creaks and jerks and lurchings does it pull itself from floor to floor, like an octogenarian who, grunting and groaning, hoists himself from his easy-chair by slow stages that wring a protest from ankle, knee, hip, back and shoulder.  The corkscrew stairway, broken and footworn though it is, seems infinitely less perilous.