That was just like Iola. The only way you can be sure she’s got a mind at all is the trouble she has making it up. If it’s true that men like the helpless kind she ought to have a string of lovers as long as the line at the box office when Caruso sings _Pagliacci_. I wonder _I_ ever got married! "Tell you what, girlie," I said, "you come up tonight and dine with me. Himself is going to be late and we two bandits will steal out after dinner and make a raid on Miss Whitehall’s." Even then she hung back. I had to coax and urge and it was only me promising I’d see her through and if necessary ask the questions, made her finally agree. The rain held on all day and it was teeming when we started out. Miss Whitehall’s flat was on the other side of town—the East Sixties—and we had to go round the Park, crowding on and off cars, fighting our way through packs of people, Iola clawing at my back and catching her umbrella in men’s hats and women’s hair till you’d think she did it on purpose. When we got to the street we turned east, walking from Madison Avenue over Park with its great huge apartment houses, and then on a ways—not far, but far enough to make you feel Miss Whitehall’s home wasn’t as stylishly located as her office. Iola was that nervous I was afraid she’d forget the number, but we found it, on a corner over a drug store, where there were large, glassy bottles in the window and advertisements of ladies offering pills and candy with such glad, inviting smiles you’d know it was damaged stock. The entrance was round on the side, and as we stood in the vestibule, dimly lit, with a line of letter boxes on each side, I couldn’t help but whisper: "You’d never think from her offices she’d live over a store." And Iola answered, pushing the button under a letter box marked "Mrs. Serena Whitehall." "It’s a shock to me. I’d no more connect her with a push-button than I would you with a glass-topped entrance and a man in knee pants." The door clicked and we went up the stairs, one feeble little electric bulb furnishing the light. There was a smell in the air like one of the tenants had had lamb stew for dinner and another was smoking the kind of cigar that tells you it’s strong and hearty half a block off. The first-floor landing was hers—a card in a frame by the door told us so—and we pressed on the bell, hearing it give a loud, whirring ring inside.