Roberts: “What’s what?”
Lawton: “I thought I heard a cry.”
Roberts: “Very likely you did. They profess to deaden these floors so that you can’t hear from one apartment to another. But I know pretty well when my neighbor overhead is trying to wheel his baby to sleep in a perambulator at three o’clock in the morning; and I guess our young lady lets the people below understand when she’s wakeful. But it’s the only way to live, after all. I wouldn’t go back to the old up-and-down-stairs, house-in-a-block system on any account. Here we all live on the ground-floor practically. The elevator equalizes everything.”
Bemis: “Yes, when it happens to be where you are. I believe I prefer the good old Florentine fashion of walking upstairs, after all.”
Lawton: “Roberts, I did hear something. Hark! It sounded like a cry for help. There!”
Roberts: “You’re nervous, doctor. It’s nothing. However, it’s easy enough to go out and see.” He goes out to the door of the apartment, and immediately returns. He beckons to Dr. Lawton and Mr. Bemis, with a mysterious whisper: “Come here both of you. Don’t alarm the ladies.”
II.
In the interior of the elevator are seated Mrs. Roberts’s Aunt Mary (Mrs. Crashaw), Mrs. Curwen, and Miss Lawton; Mr. Miller and Mr. Alfred Bemis are standing with their hats in their hands. They are in dinner costume, with their overcoats on their arms, and the ladies’ draperies and ribbons show from under their outer wraps, where they are caught up, and held with that caution which characterizes ladies in sitting attitudes which they have not been able to choose deliberately. As they talk together, the elevator rises very slowly, and they continue talking for some time before they observe that it has stopped.
Mrs. Crashaw: “It’s very fortunate that we are all here together. I ought to have been here half an hour ago, but I was kept at home by an accident to my finery, and before I could be put in repair I heard it striking the quarter past. I don’t know what my niece will say to me. I hope you good people will all stand by me if she should be violent.”
Miller: “In what a poor man may with his wife’s fan, you shall command me, Mrs. Crashaw.” He takes the fan out, and unfurls it.