After he’d gone I tidied up the place, had the morning powwow with Isabella, and then drifted into the parlor. The sun was slanting bright through the windows and as I stood looking out at the thin covering of ice, glittering here and there on the roofs—there’d been rain before the frost—I got the idea I ought to go down and see Iola. She was a frail, high-strung little body and what had happened last night in the Black Eagle Building would put a crimp in her nerves for days to come, especially as just now she had worries of her own. Clara, her sister with whom she lived, had gone into the hair business—not selling it, brushing it on ladies’ heads—and hadn’t done well, so Iola was the main support of the two of them. Three years ago she’d left the telephone company to better herself, studying typing and stenography, and at first she’d had a hard time, getting into offices where the men were so fierce they scared her so she couldn’t work, or so affectionate they scared her so she resigned her job. Then at last she landed a good place at Miss Whitehall’s—Carol Whitehall, who had a real-estate scheme—villas and cottages out in New Jersey. Now while you think of me in my blue serge suit and squirrel furs, with a red wing in my hat and a bunch of cherries pinned on my neckpiece, flashing under the city in the subway, I’ll tell you about Carol Whitehall. She’s important in this story—I guess you’d call her the heroine—for though the capital "I"s are thick in it, you’ve got to see that letter as nothing more than a hand holding a pen. The first I heard of Miss Whitehall was nearly two years back from the Cressets, friends of mine who live on a farm out Longwood way where I was once Central. She and her mother—a widow lady—came there from somewhere in the Middle West and bought the Azalea Woods Farm, a fine rich stretch of land, back in the hills behind Azalea village. They were going to run it themselves, having, the gossip said, independent means and liking the simple life. The neighbors, high and low, soon got acquainted with them and found them nice genteel ladies, the mother very quiet and dignified, but Miss Carol a live wire and as handsome as a picture. They’d been in the place about a year when the railroad threw out a branch that crossed over the hills near their land. This increased its value immensely and folks were wondering if they’d sell out—they had several offers—when it was announced that they were going to start a villa site company to be called the Azalea Woods Estates. In the Autumn when I was down at the Cressets—Soapy and I go there for Sundays sometimes—the Cresset boys had been over in their new Ford car, and said what were once open fields were all laid out in roads with little spindly trees planted along the edges. There was a swell station, white with a corrugated red roof, and several houses up, some stucco like the station and others low and squatty in the bungalow style.