Smith found the place.
"Number?" he asked again.
"Here it is," the girl said amusedly. "That is where I live. Now let me see how much visualizing you can do on that. Let me see how nearly right you can get it. And why is it brown instead of red?"
"With pleasure," said the underwriter, with a smile. "In the first place, it is brown because it is of steel and concrete fireproof construction. It is an eight-story and basement apartment building with a tile roof and a short mansard of tile in front only. There are two sections, cut off from one another except for a metal-clad door in the basement. The elevator is at the right as you enter; the stairway runs around it. There are two light courts, one front and one rear, both with stairway fire escapes. Which is your apartment?"
"West front, on the fourth floor."
"You have probably seven rooms, with four windows along the street side and four on the court. Well," he finished, laughing, "is that sufficiently visualized?"
"You have told me nearly everything except where we have our piano,"
Helen returned. "I don't suppose your diagram would show that?"
"Well, no. That wouldn't interest us as a rule, and besides, people move pianos so often. We don't try to keep them all located."
Smiling together, and better friends than they had yet been, the two turned from the map of Boston.
"Here," said Smith, "are the other maps of the Eastern Department, from Maine to Maryland, Rhode Island to Ohio. Also Canada—Halifax, Quebec, Montreal. Over at the other end of the room are the Southern cities, Atlanta, New Orleans, St. Augustine—with some of the old Spanish houses still standing. Do you know it strikes me there is something Homeric, something epic, about a map desk. You can turn to any building in any city on the continent, at a moment's notice. I can show you the Old South Church, or Fraunce's Tavern in New York where Washington bade his generals good-by, or Montcalm's headquarters at Quebec before Wolfe scaled the heights. Or you can see the Peace Conference Hotel outside Portsmouth, or the Congressional Library in Washington, or the new Chinatown in San Francisco, or the great shops of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Altoona, or even the site of the arena at Reno, Nevada, where Mr. Johnson separated Mr. Jeffries from the heavy-weight title of the world."