t's not make a chant of it. I think I get you. I'll be down there in
ten minutes. Telephone her, will you?"

"Can't you make it five?"

"Not without skipping something vital."

Still, it couldn't have been a second over ten, including shoes, hair,
and hooks-and-eyes. And a fresh white blouse. It was Martha Foote's
theory that a hotel housekeeper, dressed for work, ought to be as
inconspicuous as a steel engraving. She would have been, too, if it
hadn't been for her eyes.

She paused a moment before the door of six-eighteen and took a deep
breath. At the first brisk rat-tat of her knuckles on the door there had
sounded a shrill "Come in!" But before she could turn the knob the door
was flung open by a kimonoed mulatto girl, her eyes all whites. The girl
began to jabber, incoherently but Martha Foote passed on through the
little hall to the door of the bedroom.

Six-eighteen was in bed. At sight of her Martha Foote knew that she had
to deal with an over-wrought woman. Her hair was pushed back wildly from
her forehead. Her arms were clasped about her knees. At the left her
nightgown had slipped down so that one plump white shoulder gleamed
against the background of her streaming hair. The room was in almost
comic disorder. It was a room in which a struggle has taken place
between its occupant and that burning-eyed hag, Sleeplessness. The hag,
it was plain, had won. A half-emptied glass of milk was on the table by
the bed. Warmed, and sipped slowly, it had evidently failed to soothe. A
tray of dishes littered another table. Yesterday's dishes, their
contents congealed. Books and magazines, their covers spread wide as if
they had been flung, sprawled where they lay. A little heap of
grey-black cigarette stubs. The window curtain awry where she had stood
there during a feverish moment of the sleepless night, looking down upon
the lights of Grant Park and the sombre black void beyond that was Lake
Michigan. A tiny satin bedroom slipper on a chair, its mate, sole up,
peeping out from under the bed. A pair of satin slippers alone,
distributed thus, would make a nun's cell look disreputable. Over all
this disorder the ceiling lights, the wall lights, and the light from
two rosy lamps, beat mercilessly down; and upon the white-faced woman in
the bed.

She stared, hollow-eyed, at Martha Foote. Martha Foote, in the doorway,
gazed serenely back upon her. And Geisha McCoy's quick intelligence and
drama-sense responded to the pi