One of the popular beliefs of the time was that Miss Arnold might have gone into some small and obscure shop at a time when there was no other customer in the place and been there seized, bound, gagged, and made ready for abduction. The notion was widely accepted for the dual reason that it provided a set of circumstances under which it was possible to explain the totally unwitnessed snatching of the young woman and, at the same time, set a likely locale, since there are thousands of such little shops in New York. As a result of the currency of this story, many women hesitated to enter the establishments of cobblers, bootblacks, stationers, confectioners, tobacconists, and other petty tradesmen, especially in the more outlying parts of the city. Many bankruptcies of these minor business people resulted, as one may read from the court records. A similar fabulation, to the effect that the girl might have entered a cruising taxicab, operated by a sinister ex-convict, and been whisked off to some secret den of crime and vice, was almost as popular, with the result that cabs did a poor business with women clients for more than a year afterward. An old hackman, who was arrested in that feverish time because of the hysteria of a woman passenger, tells me that even to-day he encounters women who grow suspicious and excited, if he happens to drive by some unaccustomed route, a thing often done in these days to avoid the congestion on the main streets. While all this popular burning and sweating was going on, the police and many thousands of private investigators, professional and amateur, were busy with the problem of elucidating some motive to fit the case. Reducing the facts to their essentials and then trying to reason, the possibilities became a very general preoccupation. The deductive steps may be briefly set down. First, there were the alternative propositions of voluntary or involuntary absence, of hiding or abduction. Second, if the theory of forced absence was to be entertained, there were only two general possibilities--abduction for ransom or kidnapping by some maniac. The ideas of murder, detention for revenge, and the like, come under the latter head. The notion of a fatal accident had been eliminated. The proposition of voluntary absence presented a more complex picture. Suicide, elopement, amnesia, personal rebellion, an unrevealed family situation, a forbidden love affair, the desire to hide some social lapse--any of these might be the basis of a self-willed absence of a permanent or temporary kind. The failure, after months of quest, to find any trace of a body, seemed to have rendered the propositions of murder and of suicide alike improbable. Elopement and amnesia were likewise rendered untenable theories by time, nor was it long before the conceit of a disagreement was relegated to the improbabilities.