To confirm this, the eye, penetrating the gloom, is confronted by a
great blank metal door that sheathes the elevator. To ride in that
elevator is to know adventure, so painfully, so protestingly, with such
creaks and jerks and lurchings does it pull itself from floor to floor,
like an octogenarian who, grunting and groaning, hoists himself from his
easy-chair by slow stages that wring a protest from ankle, knee, hip,
back and shoulder. The corkscrew stairway, broken and footworn though it
is, seems infinitely less perilous.

First floor--second--third--fourth. Whew! And there you are in Josie
Fifer's kingdom--a great front room, unexpectedly bright and even cosy
with its whir of sewing machines: tables, and tables, and tables, piled
with orderly stacks of every sort of clothing, from shoes to hats, from
gloves to parasols; and in the room beyond this, and beyond that, and
again beyond that, row after row of high wooden cabinets stretching the
width of the room, and forming innumerable aisles. All of Bluebeard's
wives could have been tucked away in one corner of the remotest and
least of these, and no one the wiser. All grimly shut and locked, they
are, with the key in Josie's pocket. But when, at the behest of McCabe,
or sometimes even Sid Hahn himself, she unlocked and opened one of
these doors, what treasures hung revealed! What shimmer and sparkle and
perfume--and moth balls! The long-tailed electric light bulb held high
in one hand, Josie would stand at the door like a priestess before her
altar.

There they swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You
remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini
wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how
eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with
its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin