allow
woman, with a quiet, capable manner, a pungent trick of the tongue on
occasion, a sparse fluff of pale-coloured hair, and big, bony-knuckled
hands, such as you see on women who have the gift of humanness. She was
forty-eight now--still plain, still spare, still sallow. Those bony,
big-knuckled fingers had handed keys to potentates, and pork-packers,
and millinery buyers from Seattle; and to princes incognito, and paupers
much the same--the difference being that the princes dressed down to
the part, while the paupers dressed up to it.

Time, experience, understanding and the daily dealing with ever-changing
humanity had brought certain lines into Sadie Corn's face. So skilfully
were they placed that the unobservant put them down as wrinkles on the
countenance of a homely, middle-aged woman; but he who read as he ran
saw that the lines about the eyes were quizzical, shrewd lines, which
come from the practice of gauging character at a glance; that the
mouth-markings meant tolerance and sympathy and humour; that the
forehead furrows had been carved there by those master chisellers,
suffering and sacrifice.

In the last three or four years Sadie Corn had taken to wearing a little
lavender-and-white crocheted shawl about her shoulders on cool days, and
when Two-fifty-seven, who was a regular, caught his annual heavy cold
late in the fall, Sadie would ask him sharply whether he had on his
winter flannels. On his replying in the negative she would rebuke him
scathingly and demand a bill of sizable denomination; and when her watch
was over she would sally forth to purchase four sets of men's winter
underwear. As captain of the Magnifique's thirty-four floor clerks Sadie
Corn's authority extended from the parlours to the roof, but her
especial domain was floor two. Ensconced behind her little desk in a
corner, blocked in by mailracks, pantry signals, pneumatic-tube chutes
and telephone, with a clear view of the elevators and stairway, Sadie
Corn was mistress of the moods, manners and morals of the Magnifique's
second floor.

It was six thirty p.m. on Monday of Automobile Show Week when Sadie Corn
came on watch. She came on with a lively, well-developed case of
neuralgia over her right eye and extending down into her back teeth.
With its usual spitefulness the attack had chosen to make its appearance
during her long watch. It never selected her short-watch days, when she
was on duty only from eleven a.m. until six-thirty