wilful, contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into
one of Ishmael-like rebellion.

Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown,
and artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It
seemed to stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of
which to be proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair
was daily plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the
meticulous attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching
abundance was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an
intricate structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again
in ruins, just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers
rebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done
thoughtfully and calmly, as though it were a religious rite, as though
it were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn
of beauty.

He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at
the time of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned of
her association with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a
trained nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and
outwitted him at every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." To
effect this he had whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up
from the City Hospital and sent him in to her as an injured
elevator-boy looking for first-aid treatment. One glimpse of her work
on that thumb showed her to be betrayingly ignorant of both
figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and Blake, finally satisfied as to
the imposture, carried on his investigation, showed "Doctor Callahan"
to be Connie Binhart, the con-man and bank thief, and sent the two
adventurers scurrying away to shelter.