Daisy gathered from their earlier talks that Madeline’s family disapproved the match. She even learned, from something Karl said, that there was another suitor--one Phil--on whom the family smiled and whom Madeline cordially detested. Once or twice, too, Phil called up Apartment 60. He had a husky voice and spoke brief commonplaces. Madeline answered him listlessly and still more briefly. But he seldom phoned to her. And she never, by any chance, phoned to him. So the ardent, tenderly melancholy love-story wore on. The lovers would make appointments for clandestine meetings--would speak in joyous retrospect of luncheons or motor-drives of the preceding day. Evidently, Madeline’s cruel family kept stern watch upon her movements. Daisy used to smile in joyous approval at the girl’s dainty cleverness in outmaneuvering them and meeting her sweetheart. Ever through the glory of their love ran that black thread of melancholy. Apparently all the glad secret meetings and the adoring phone-talks could not make up to them for the family’s opposition. Daisy had to bite her lips, sometimes, to keep from breaking in on the conversation and demanding: “Why don’t you two run off and get married? They’d have to come around, then. And if they didn’t, why should you care?” To a girl cooped up alone all day in a stuffy cubby-hole, imagination is ten times stronger than to the girl whose thoughts can be distracted by outside things. To Daisy, immured in her dim-lighted cupboard behind the elevators, this romance of Karl and Madeline was fast becoming the very biggest thing in her drab life. These two lovers were as romantic, as poetical, as yearningly adoring as _Romeo_ and _Juliet_. Karl was as desperately jealous as _Othello_ or as the hero of one of Laura Jean Libbey’s greatest books. Madeline was _the Captive Maid_ come to life again. Oh, it was all very, very wonderful! Then came the day of jarring disillusionment, a day which Daisy followed by sobbing until midnight on her none-too-soft boarding-house bed, three blocks to westward. Promptly at nine that morning, as usual, Karl called up Apartment 60. “Sweetheart,” he joyfully hailed Madeline, “I’ve just bought the new car. It’s a beauty. And you’re going to be the very first person to ride in it--to consecrate it.” “That’s darling of you!” replied Madeline in evident delight. “I’d rather ride in a wheelbarrow with you than in a Rolls-Royce with--with--” “With Phil?” asked Karl almost savagely. “With anybody,” she evaded. “Tell me more about the car. Is it--” “I’m not going to tell you,” he refused. “I’m going to show it to you instead. Here’s my idea: I’ll knock off work at noon and bring the car uptown. I’ll meet you at the subway kiosk at half-after twelve; we can run up to the Arrowhead to lunch, and then on up to the Tumble Inn for--”