The strange part of it all is that at first Hector was too bashful to go like an avuncular just arrived from Canajoharie and have Harriet extract the Graftopolis real estate and microbes from the nether side of his hive-scratchers. Instead he sought the services of a New York Central detective as his John Alden, the fair Harriet states. But she fell for the detective presented proposition and consented to the introduction. The promise of marriage, which Harriet claims was made, might have been either the last resort of a man dealing with a near-Pamela and cute minx combined, or else a gratuitous piece of calorified atmosphere. But as she had to know some day that he could not keep his word without committing bigamy, Hector preferred that it should be from him rather than from his vindictive investigating storm-and-strife, or the serpentine lollypop-licker of Mrs. Grundy. Having had preliminary practice in another way, he screwed up his courage and broke the news, although he let her down easy with the hoary classic bucolic cataplasm about his wife not understanding him, there would soon be a divorce, and then his Harriet would be =IT=. That was all Harriet wanted to hear. She flew the seven-dollar-a-day coop whose manager, as there were several times seven dollars of arrears, was so unkind as to retain her powder-rag, her tooth-brush, and other feminine impedimenta which we forbear to catalogue. Harriet went back to finding her own rent-money, but nevertheless she did not break with her Hector. Instead she kept Hectoring him with special delivery letters and telegrams; ditto his wife, although she charges that in the latter case Hector had fixed all the apartment house help so that none of her retaliatory revelations would strike home. She says, too, that her Lothario had the St. Vitus dance even when she was not in proximity to him. Seeing that he had taken her all and given her in return nothing but candy, flowers and broken promises, she is going to try very hard to make him pay, and has brought suit for a hundred thousand dollars. She exults that she did not sell or give away all her old clothes and resign her position, as he urged her to do, and says she would not be in a Gehenna of a fix if she had.