The smartest of smart tailor-mades was none too smart for her. Nothing was too smart for her, who was so exquisitely fine and well-bred a creature. She was wearing tailor-mades, with a trig hat to match, when she opened the door of her entry hall for Mullinix. "Just going out, weren't you?" he asked as they shook hands. "No, just coming in," she said. "I had only just come in when the hall man called me up saying you were downstairs." "I had trouble getting him to send up my name at all," he said with a half smile on his face. "He insisted on knowing all about me and my business before he announced me. So I told him everything nearly--except the truth." "I gathered from his tone he was a bit doubtful about you; but I was glad to get the word. This is the third time you've favoured me with a visit and each of the other times something highly exciting followed. Come in and let me make you a cup of tea, won't you? Is it business that brings you?" "Yes," he said, "it's business." They sat down in the big inner studio room; on one side of the fireplace the short, slow-speaking, colourless-looking man who knew the inner blackness of so many whited sepulchres; and on the other side, facing him from across the tea table, this small patrician lady who, having rich kinfolk and friends still richer and a family tree deep-rooted in the most Knickerbockian stratum of the Manhattan social schist, nevertheless chose to earn her own living; and while earning it to find opportunity for service to her Government in a confidential capacity. Not all the volunteers who worked on difficult espionage jobs through the wartime carried cards from the Intelligence Department. "Yes," he repeated, "it's business--a bigger piece of business and a harder one and probably a more interesting one than the last thing you helped on. If it weren't business I wouldn't be coming here to-day, taking up your time. I know how busy you are with your own affairs." "Oh, I'm not busy," she said. "This is one of my loafing days. Since lunch time I've been indulging in my favourite passion. I've been prowling through a secondhand bookstore over on Lexington Avenue, picking up bargains. There's the fruit of my shopping." She indicated a pile of five or six nibbled-looking volumes in dingy covers resting upon one corner of the low mantelshelf. "Works on interior decorating?" he guessed. "Goodness, no! Decorating is my business; this is my pleasure. The top one of the heap--the one bound in red--is all about chess." "Chess! Did anybody ever write a whole book about chess?"