don't make a play. Besides, Fritzi Kirke wears the biggest shoe of any
actress I ever saw. A woman with feet like that"--she picked up a satin
slipper, size 7-1/2 C--"hasn't any business on the stage. She ought to
travel with a circus. Here, Etta. Hang this away in D, next to the
amethyst blue velvet, and be sure and lock the door."

McCabe had been right. A waspish wit was Josie's.

The question is whether to reveal to you now where it was that Josie
Fifer reigned thus, queen of the cast-offs; or to take you back to the
days that led up to her being there--the days when she was José Fyfer on
the programme.

Her domain was the storage warehouse of Hahn & Lohman, as you may have
guessed. If your business lay Forty-third Street way, you might have
passed the building a hundred times without once giving it a seeing
glance. It was not Forty-third Street of the small shops, the smart
crowds, and the glittering motors. It was the Forty-third lying east of
the Grand Central sluice gates; east of fashion; east, in a word, of
Fifth Avenue--a great square brick building smoke-grimed, cobwebbed, and
having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into
disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks Romance, and
her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother Comedy, the cut-up.

A worn flight of wooden steps leads up from the sidewalk to the dim
hallway; a musty-smelling passage wherein you are met by a genial sign
which reads:

"No admittance. Keep out. This means you."