“Sure, lady, I can get it out,” he told me. “But I don’t know what song and dance to give ’em in the office that’ll make ’em let me leave the elevator. I’ll go try and see.” After waiting fifteen minutes for the man to return I pushed the button. The elevator started up at once. In sight of me the operator shook his head. “I’ve been waiting for you to ring. I can’t move unless I get a ring. That’s a rule.” He opened the elevator door. “Maybe if you goes down you can get that woman to let me off. I told her you was sick and that it wouldn’t take me ten minutes, but it didn’t do no good.” I stepped into the elevator and went down to the office. The clerk that afternoon was a small blonde woman, with a face as hard as a flint rock. After explaining conditions I asked her to allow the operator to leave the elevator long enough to get the key from my door—the man standing at my elbow remarking that it would not take more than five or six minutes. “No,” snapped flint-face. “We’ve had all we’re going to take—guests putting their keys in upside down. We’re going to stop it. You’ll have to wait until Jack gets off. Then if he wants to help you it’s no affair of ours what he does in his free time.” “When do you get off?” I asked the operator. “Six o’clock.” It was then seventeen minutes of three. Three hours and seventeen minutes to wait! The tight sensation in my face had passed into a sharp stinging burning that every minute was growing more and more intense. Three hours and seventeen minutes! The doctors had cautioned me against allowing erysipelas to get to my eyes. I begged that woman as though begging for my life—for I believed that I begged for my sight. It had absolutely no effect on her. When I asked for the manager she laughed at me. “Miss Diggs is resting,” she told me, and she chuckled with delight. “You disturb her Sunday-afternoon nap and she would have your key taken out the lock, and tomorrow morning she’ll have you moved out the house. If guests don’t like our rules they can leave. We’ve got dozens on our waiting-list ready to take your place.” Despairing of getting the woman to change her mind, I stepped into the hot little reception-room and took my seat. It was stifling. I could see the sun beaming through the windows of the library and the dance-hall on the other side of the exchange, so I knew they were still hotter. My face was like a red-hot blaze, and no tooth ever ached as painfully as my whole head. Putting my pride in my pocket I crept out and asked the woman to let me have five cents to telephone to a drug-store. I reminded her that my pocketbook was locked in my room, then that I was a friend of Miss Stafford, who had lived at the Jane Leonard for nearly five years. “Why don’t you borrow of Miss Stafford?”