Karl, it seemed, was a downtown business man. As scientists reconstruct an entire fossil animal from a single bone of its left hind leg, so Daisy Reynolds built up a vision of Karl from his deep and powerful voice. He was tall, slender, graceful, yet broad of shoulder and deep of chest. Brown curls crisped above his white Greek forehead. His eyes were somber yet glowing. His age was from twenty-eight to thirty. He dressed like a collar advertisement.
Madeline was still easier to reconstruct, from her voice. She too was tall. She was willowy and infinitely graceful—gold-brown of hair, dark blue of eye, with soft-molded little features and long jetty lashes. With such a voice, she could not have been otherwise.
Daisy gathered from their earlier talks that Madeline’s family disapproved the match. She even learned, from something Karl said, that there was another suitor—one Phil—on whom the family smiled and whom Madeline cordially detested. Once or twice, too, Phil called up Apartment 60. He had a husky voice and spoke brief commonplaces. Madeline answered him listlessly and still more briefly. But he seldom phoned to her. And she never, by any chance, phoned to him.
So the ardent, tenderly melancholy love-story wore on. The lovers would make appointments for clandestine meetings—would speak in joyous retrospect of luncheons or motor-drives of the preceding day. Evidently, Madeline’s cruel family kept stern watch upon her movements. Daisy used to smile in joyous approval at the girl’s dainty cleverness in outmaneuvering them and meeting her sweetheart.
Ever through the glory of their love ran that black thread of melancholy. Apparently all the glad secret meetings and the adoring phone-talks could not make up to them for the family’s opposition. Daisy had to bite her lips, sometimes, to keep from breaking in on the conversation and demanding:
“Why don’t you two run off and get married? They’d have to come around, then. And if they didn’t, why should you care?�
To a girl cooped up alone all day in a stuffy cubby-hole, imagination is ten times stronger than to the girl whose thoughts can be distracted by outside things. To Daisy, immured in her dim-lighted cupboard behind the elevators, this romance of Karl and Madeline was fast becoming the very biggest thing in her drab life.
These two lovers were as romantic, as poetical, as yearningly adoring as Romeo and Juliet. Karl was as desperately jealous as Othello or as the hero of one of Laura Jean Libbey’s greatest books. Madeline was the Captive Maid come to life again. Oh, it was all very, very wonderful!
Then came the day of jarring disillusionment, a day which Daisy followed by sobbing until midnight on her none-too-soft boarding-house bed, three blocks to westward.
Promptly at nine that morning, as usual, Karl called up Apartment 60.