"Am I to understand that what you call politics and pull, then, will let a woman rob a man of thirty thousand dollars and go scot free?" "My dear fellow, that type of woman never _robs_ a man. She doesn't need to. They just blink and hand it over. Then they think of home and mother, about ten hours after." "But that doesn't sound quite reasonable," I contended. The older man looked solemnly at his cigar-end before asking his next question. "Have you seen her yet?" "No, I haven't," I replied as I rose to go. "But I intend to." He moved his heavy shoulder in a quick half-circular forward thrust. It might have meant anything. But I did not linger to find out. I was too impressed with the need of prompt and personal action on my part to care much for the advice of outsiders. But as each wakeful hour went by I found myself possessed of an ever widening curiosity to see this odd and interesting woman who, as Doyle expressed it, had retained reputation at the expense of character. It was extremely early the next morning that I presented myself at Vinnie Brunelle's apartment-hotel. I had not only slept badly; I had also dreamed of myself as a flagellant monk sent across scorching sands to beg a barbaric and green-eyed Thais to desist from tapping telegraph-wires leading into the camp of Alexander the Great. The absurdity of that opianic nightmare seemed to project itself into my actual movements of the morning. The exacting white light of day withered the last tendril of romance from my quixotic crusade. It was only by assuring myself, not so much that I was espousing the cause of the fallen, but that I was about to meet a type of woman quite new to my experience, that I was able to face Miss Brunelle's unbetrayingly sober door. This door was duly answered by a maid, by a surprisingly decorous maid in white cap and apron. I was conscious of her veiled yet inquisitorial eye resting on my abashed person for the smallest fraction of a second. I almost suspected that in that eye might be detected a trace of something strangely like contempt. But, a little to my astonishment, I was admitted quite without question. "Miss Brunelle is just back from her morning ride in the park," this maid explained. I entered what was plainly a dining-room, a small but well-lighted chamber. Striped awnings still kept the tempered autumn sun from the opened windows, where a double row of scarlet geranium-tops stood nodding in the breeze. At one end of the table in the center of the room sat a woman, eating her breakfast. She was younger looking, much younger looking, than I had thought she would be. Had she not sat there already inundated by the corroding acids of an earlier prejudice, I would even have admitted that she was an extremely beautiful woman.