After two or three more questions of his and assurances of hers the cab
was allowed to swing out into the current. John had given the driver
careful navigation orders, and Marjorie leaned back contentedly enough
and watched the busy people, all hot and haggard, as New York's people
sometimes are in the first warm days of May. Her collection of
illustrated post-cards had prepared her to identify many of the places
she passed, but once or twice she felt, a little ruefully the difference
between this, her actual first glimpse of New York and the same first
glimpse as she and John had planned it before the benign, but hardly
felicitous, interference of Uncle Richard. This feeling of loneliness
was strongly in the ascendent when the cab stopped under an ornate
portico and two large male creatures, in powdered wigs and white silk
stockings, emerged before her astonished eyes. Open flew her little
door, down jumped the cabman, out rushed other menials and laid hands
upon her baggage. Horses fretted, pedestrians risked their lives, motors
snorted and newsboys clamored as an enormous police-appearing person
assisted her to alight. He had such an air of having been expecting and
longing for her arrival that she wondered innocently whether John had
telephoned about her. This thought persisted with her until she and her
following of baggage-laden pages drew up before the desk, but it fell
from her with a crash when she encountered the aloof, impersonal,
world-weary regard of the presiding clerk. In all Marjorie's happy life
she had never met anything but welcome. The belle of a fast-growing town
is rather a sheltered person, and not even the most confiding of
ingénues could detect a spark of greeting in the lackadaisical regard of
this highly-manicured young man.

Marjorie began her story, began to recite her lesson: "Outside rooms,
not lower than the fourth nor higher than the eighth floor; the Fifth