"Was she the girl at the switchboard that you mentioned in connection with the von Ewald case?" I interrupted.
"That's the one," said Quinn, "and, what's more, she played a leading role in that melodrama, a play in which they didn't use property guns or cartridges."
Miss Lang [continued Quinn] was one of the few women I ever heard of that practically solved a Secret Service case "on her own." Of course, in the past, the different governmental detective services have found it to their advantage to go outside the male sex for assistance.
There have been instances where women in the employ of the Treasury Department rendered valuable service in trailing smugglers—the matter of the Deauville diamonds is a case in point—and even the Secret Service hasn't been above using women to assist in running counterfeiters to earth, while the archives of the State Department would reveal more than one interesting record of feminine co-operation in connection with underground diplomacy.
But in all these cases the women were employed to handle the work and they were only doing what they were paid for, while Virginia Lang—
Well, in the first place, she was one of the girls in charge of the switchboard at the Rennoc in New York. You know the place—that big apartment hotel on Riverside Drive where the lobby is only a shade less imposing than the bell-boys and it costs you a month's salary to speak to the superintendent. They never have janitors in a place like that.
Virginia herself—I came to know her fairly well in the winter of nineteen seventeen, after Dave Carroll had gone to the front—was well qualified by nature to be the heroine of any story. Rather above the average in size, she had luckily taken advantage of her physique to round out her strength with a gymnasium course. But in spite of being a big woman, she had the charm and personality which are more often found in those less tall. When you couple this with a head of wonderful hair, a practically perfect figure, eyes into which a man could look and, looking, lose himself, lips which would have caused a lip stick to blush and—Oh, what's the use? Words only caricature a beautiful woman, and, besides, if you haven't gotten the effect already, there's nothing that I could tell you that would help any.
In the spring of nineteen sixteen, when the von Ewald chase was at its height, Miss Lang was employed at the Rennoc switchboard and it speaks well for her character when I can tell you that not one of the bachelor tenants ever tried a second time to put anything over. Virginia's eyes could snap when they wanted to and Virginia's lips could frame a cutting retort as readily as a pleasant phrase.
In a place like the Rennoc, run as an apartment hotel, the guests change quite frequently, and it was some task to keep track of all of them, particularly when there were three girls working in the daytime, though only one was on at night. They took it by turns—each one working one week in four at night and the other three holding down the job from eight to six. So, as it happened, Virginia did not see Dave Carroll until he had been there nearly a month. He blew in from Washington early one evening and straightway absented himself from the hotel until sometime around seven the following morning, following the schedule right through, every night.