"Are you Mr. Jerold?"
"Jerold Garrison," the detective answered. "My sign is unfinished.
May I offer you a chair?"
His caller sat down beside the desk. She continued to study his face frankly, with a half-shy, half-defiant scrutiny, as if she banished a natural diffidence under pressure of necessity.
She spoke again, abruptly.
"I wish to procure peculiar services. Are you a very well-known detective?"
"I have never called myself a detective," said Garrison. "I'm trying to occupy a higher sphere of usefulness. I left college a year ago, and last week opened my office here and became a New Yorker."
He might, in all modesty, have exhibited a scrap-book filled with accounts of his achievements, with countless references to his work as a "scientific criminologist" of rare mental attainments. Of his attainments as a gentleman there was no need of reference. They proclaimed themselves in his bearing.
His visitor laid a glove and a scrap of paper on the desk.
"It isn't so much detective services I require," she said; "but of course you are widely acquainted in New York—I mean with young men particularly?"
"No," he replied, "I know almost none. But I know the city fairly well, if that will answer your purpose."