(Yes, your telephonic love-talk, your fierce love-spats and your sacredest love-secrets have been avidly heard--and possibly repeated--again and again, by Central. Remember that, next time. When you hear a faint click on the wire during your conversation,--and sometimes when you don’t,--an operator is pretty certain to be listening in.) At first Daisy was amused by what she heard. The parsimonious butcher-order of the house’s richest woman, the hiccoughed excuses of a husband whom business detained downtown, the vapid chatter of lad and lass, the scolding of slow dressmakers, the spicy anecdotes told by half-hour phone-gabblers--all these were a pleasant variation on the day’s routine. But at last, they began to pall. And just as they waxed tiresome--romance began. The voice in Apartment 60--a clear voice, girlish and vibrant--called up 9999-Z Worth. And Worth 9999-Z replied in a tone that fairly throbbed with eager longing. That was the beginning. Shamelessly--soon rapturously--Daisy Reynolds listened in. The voice in Apartment 60 belonged to a girl named Madeline. And Worth 9999-Z (whose first name, by the way, was Karl) spoke that foreign-sounding name _Madeline_ as though it were a phrase of hauntingly sweet church music. He and Madeline had known each other, it appeared, for some months; but only recently had they made the divine discovery of their mutual love. It was then that the phone talks had begun--the talks that varied in number from three to seven a day, and in length from three to thirty minutes. Always, now, promptly at nine o’clock in the morning, Karl called up his sweetheart. And always, an hour or so later, she called him up for a return-dialogue. Their talk was not mushy; it was beautiful. It thrilled with a love as deathless as the stars, a love through whose longing ran a current of unhappiness that Daisy could not understand. Daisy grew to live for those talks. They became part of her very life--the loveliest part. She was curt, almost snappish, when other calls interfered with the bliss of listening-in. More than once she shamelessly broke off the connection when Madeline chanced to be talking to some old bore at a time when Karl sought to speak to her. Karl, it seemed, was a downtown business man. As scientists reconstruct an entire fossil animal from a single bone of its left hind leg, so Daisy Reynolds built up a vision of Karl from his deep and powerful voice. He was tall, slender, graceful, yet broad of shoulder and deep of chest. Brown curls crisped above his white Greek forehead. His eyes were somber yet glowing. His age was from twenty-eight to thirty. He dressed like a collar advertisement. Madeline was still easier to reconstruct, from her voice. She too was tall. She was willowy and infinitely graceful--gold-brown of hair, dark blue of eye, with soft-molded little features and long jetty lashes. With such a voice, she could not have been otherwise.