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Rh “Billy here?”

“Dunno.”

“Thank you, little one.”

Sometimes they departed, sometimes they joined Jarvis’s waiting party. Lovely ladies, and some not so lovely. Old and young, fat and thin, they climbed the many stairs and met their disappointment cheerfully. They usually fell upon Jack, or Billy, or Jim, of the waiters, who, in turn, fell upon Belle, or Susan, or Fay.

“What are you with? How’s business?” were always the first questions, followed by shop talk, unintelligible to Jarvis. One youth said that he had been to this office ten successive mornings without getting an appointment. The others laughed, and one woman boasted that she had the record, for she had gone twenty-eight times before she saw Frohman, the last engagement she sought.

“But he engaged me the 29th,” she laughed.

They impressed Jarvis as the lightest-hearted set he had ever encountered. They laughed over everything and nothing. By one o’clock Jarvis and the cheerful one were again in sole possession.

“Don’t you ever eat?” she asked him.

“Oh, is it lunch time?” he inquired.