“You see,” Zizi said, nodding her correctly hatted little head, “I’ve just simply got to be taken in somewhere in the house, and it might as well be here. I’m too young to have an apartment by myself, and I’ll promise you won’t regret any ‘small kindnesses’ you may show me. In fact, Mr Pennington Wise, my sponsor in baptism, is the greatest rememberer of small kindnesses you ever saw!”
“My goodness!” remarked Mrs Macey, dazzled by the girl’s beauty and animation, and bewildered by her insistent manner.
“Yep,” sauced Zizi, with her irresistible smile, “it’s your goodness that’ll turn the trick. I’ll confide to you that I’m here on business, most important secret business, and if your goodness pans out well and you put me up properly, you’ll be what is known as handsomely rewarded. So, which is my room?”
The girl whirled through a doorway and spied a neat little bedroom. “This’ll do,” she said, and setting down her small handbag proceeded to push things around on the dresser and fling her gloves and veil into a drawer, then with what was indubitably a farewell smile, she gently pushed Mrs Macey out, and closed the door after her, pausing only to say, “You’ve good horse sense,—use it.”
“So far, so good,” commented Zizi, to her pretty reflection in the mirror. “That woman’s a joy. Easily managed, but full of initiative. Just the sort I like.”
She flew around, adjusting the appointments to suit her taste; she telephoned downstairs for her further luggage to be sent up, and soon she was as fully established in the room as if she had been there weeks.
“And now,” she spoke finally to the pretty girl in her mirror, “I shall sally forth, as they call it, and see what’s what in The Campanile.”
Her progress through the house was so inconspicuous and casual that no one noticed her especially. It was Zizi’s forte to go around unnoticed, when she chose. Though she could, on the other hand, make a decided stir, merely by her appearance.
A slender wisp of a girl, black of hair and eyes, demure without self-consciousness, and gentle-mannered, she glided here and there as she listed and none said her nay. She quickly learned the location of rooms and people, the ways of the house and certain of its tenants, and, without effort, made friends with elevator girls and other employees.
She arrived at last at the Binney rooms, now occupied by Wise.