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My friend Macartney-Smith has working theories for everything. He illustrated one of these the other day by relating something that happened in the Giralda apartment house, where he lives in a suite overlooking Central Park. I do not remember whether he was expounding his notion that the apartment house has solved the question of co-operative housekeeping, or whether he was engaged in demonstrating certain propositions regarding the influence of the city on the country. Since I have forgotten what it was intended to prove, the incident has seemed more interesting. It is bad for a story to medicate it with a theory. However, here are the facts as Macartney-Smith relates them with his Q.E.D. omitted.

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I do not know [he began] by what accident or on what recommendation the manager of the Giralda brought a girl from Iowa to act as clerk and cashier in the restaurant.

The new cashier had lived in a town where there were differences in social standing, but no recognized distinctions, after you had left out the sedimentary poverty-stricken class. She not only had no notions of the lines of social cleavage in a great apartment-house, but she had never heard of chaperonage, or those other indelicacies that go along with the high civilization of a metropolis. I have no doubt she was the best scholar in the arithmetic class in the village high school, and ten to one she was the champion at croquet. She took life with a zest unknown to us New Yorkers, and let the starchiest people in the house know that she was glad to see them when they returned after an absence by going across the dining-room to shake hands with them and to inquire whether they had had a good time. Even the gently frigid manner of Mrs. Drupe could not chill her friendliness; she was accustomed to accost that lady in the elevator, and demand, “How is Mr. Drupe?” whenever that gentleman chanced to be absent. It was not possible for her to imagine that Mrs. Drupe could be otherwise than grateful for any manifestation of a friendly interest in her husband.

To show any irritation was not Mrs. Drupe’s way; that would have disturbed the stylish repose of her bearing even more than misplaced cordiality. She always returned the salutations of Miss Wakefield, but in a tone so neutral, cool, and cucumberish that she hoped the girl would feel rebuked and learn a little more diffidence, or at least learn that the Drupes did not care for her acquaintance. But the only result of such treatment was that Miss Wakefield would say to the clerk in the office: “Your Eastern people have such stiff ways that they make me homesick. But they don’t mean any harm, I suppose.”

Some of the families in the Giralda rather liked the new cashier; these were they who had children. The little children chatted and laughed with her across her desk when they came down as forerunners to give the order for the family dinner. If it were only lunch time, when few people were in the restaurant, they went behind the desk and embraced the cashier and had a romp with her. The smallest chaps she would take up in her arms while she pulled out the drawers to show them her paper knife and trinkets; and when there were flowers, she would often break off one apiece for even those least amiable little plagues that in an apartment house are the torment of their nurses and their mammas the livelong day. This not only gave pleasure to the infantry, but relieved an aching which the poor girl had for a once cheerful home, now broken up by the death of her parents and the scattering abroad of brothers and sisters.

The young men in the house thought her “a jolly girl,” since she would chat with them over her desk as freely as she would have chatted across the counter with the clerks in Cedar Falls, where she came from. She was equally cordial with the head waiter, and with those of his staff who knew any more English than was indispensable to the taking of an order. But her frank familiarity with young gentlemen and friendly speech with servants were offensive to some of the ladies. They talked it over, and decided that Miss Wakefield was not a modest girl; that at least she did not know her place, and that the manager ought to dismiss her if he meant to maintain the tone of the house. The manager–poor fellow!–had to hold his own place against the rivalry of the treasurer, and when such complaints were made to him what could he do? He stood out a while for Miss Wakefield, whom he liked; but when the influential Mrs. Drupe wrote to him that the cashier at the desk in the restaurant was not a well-behaved girl, he knew that it was time to look out for another.