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 ingenues 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 Avenue side if possible--and was Mrs. Robert Blake in?" The lackadaisical young man consulted the register with a disparaging eye. "Not staying here," Marjorie understood him to remark. "Oh, it doesn't matter--but about the rooms?" "Front!" drawled the young man, and several blue-clad bellboys ceased from lolling on a bench and approached the desk. "Register here," commanded the clerk, twirling the big book on its turn-table toward Marjorie so suddenly that she jumped, and laying his pink-tinted finger on its first blank line. "No, thank you," she stammered, "I was not to register until my husband--" and her heart cried out within her for that she was saying these new, dear words for the first time to so unresponsive a stranger--"told me not to register until he should come and see that the rooms were satisfactory. He will be here presently."