He wondered now whether he had answered the appeal because a woman was in a desperate situation or because that woman was Claire Robson.  All through the dinner hour at the Tom Forsythes he had thought about her, had speculated vaguely what mischance or effrontery had been responsible for her ill-timed visit to Flint’s.  He remembered trying to decide whether the young woman was extraordinarily deep or extraordinarily simple and frank.  He did not like to concede that he could be influenced by anything so transparently malicious as Mrs. Richards’s statements regarding the absence of Mrs. Flint, but he was bound to admit that they did nothing to render the situation less innocent; what had particularly annoyed him was the fact that he should have given the matter a second thought.  To begin with, it was none of his business and he was not a man who presumed to judge or even speculate on other people’s indiscretions.  Claire Robson was no sheltered schoolgirl.  She was a full-grown woman, in the thick of business life.  Such women were not taken unawares.  He had just dismissed the whole affair from his mind on this basis when Claire’s telephone message came to him.  Even now he marveled at the sense of satisfaction that her appeal had given.  But he had found no savor in a situation that compelled him to interfere in Flint’s program.  Such a move on his part was contrary to his standards, to his training in comradeship, to all his acquired philosophy.  He had the well-bred man’s distaste for getting into a mess.  He abhorred scenes and conspicuous complications.

He had come through the incident with steadily waning enthusiasm and a decision to wash his hands in the future of all such unprofitable trifling.  But the sudden knowledge that the young woman was in desperate trouble revived his interest.  He had no idea how serious Mrs. Robson’s illness was or whether Claire had any hopes for a new position.  But Miss Munch’s words had been significant.  Claire had been dismissed, and Stillman knew enough about present business stagnation to conclude that for the time, at least, Claire Robson faced a bleak outlook.  He realized the indelicacy of any definite move on his part, but it occurred to him that it might be well to talk the situation over with some one—­preferably a woman.  As he tossed his cigar butt aside, Lily Condor appealed to him as just the person for the emergency.  Therefore he looked her up without further ado.

He found her at home, curled up among the cushions of a davenport that did service as a bed when the scenes were shifted.  She was living in a tiny apartment consisting of one room and a kitchenette that gave Stillman the impression of a juggler’s cabinet.  Nothing in this room was ever by any chance what it seemed.  Things that looked like doors led nowhere; bits of stationary furniture usually yielded to the slightest pressure and revealed strange secrets.  He had seen Mrs. Condor deftly construct a card-table out of an easy-chair, and he had no doubt that the oak table in the center of the room could have been converted into a chiffonier or a chassis-lounge at a given signal.