“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m too old to go to jail.”

But Sean O’Donnell’s restraining hand was on his arm.

“Wait, Frank—for my sake—just hear what it is that Mr. Love proposes.”

It was a week later that Lily de Chantal set out in her carriage, from the distant north-western territory of the United States, to drive down to Gramercy Park.

Dakota Territory. Still not a state: a vast, wild wilderness. But when, a couple of years ago, Mr. Edward Clark the developer had built a huge, isolated apartment building on the west side of Central Park—all the way up at Seventy-second Street—he had decided to call it the Dakota. It seemed Mr. Clark had a fascination for Indian names. He’d already built another apartment house called the Wyoming, and had hoped to name one of the West Side boulevards Idaho Avenue. In its splendid isolation, with neighboring blocks empty except for a few small stores and shanties, the mighty Dakota might just as well have been in some remote territory, as far as the fashionable world was concerned.

“Nobody lives up there, for heaven’s sake,” they said. “And anyway, who lives in apartments?”

The answer to that question was simple. Until some years ago, only poor people lived in apartments—houses split up by floors—or in tenements, where even the floors were subdivided. Splendid apartments might be a feature of great European capitals like Vienna and Paris. But not New York. The people you knew lived in houses.

Yet there were signs of change. Other apartment buildings had appeared in the city, though none as grand as the Dakota. The building, a somewhat barn-like version of the French Renaissance, stared rather bleakly across Central Park and the pond where people skated in winter. But, it had to be confessed, it had its points.

Aside from the monumental Indian motifs with which Mr. Clark had decorated the building, the apartments were huge, with plenty of servants’ quarters. With their soaring ceilings, the reception rooms in the largest apartments were quite as big as those in many mansions. And soon people noticed something else. These apartments were rather convenient. If you wanted to go to your country house for the summer months, for instance, you could safely lock your door without even leaving a housekeeper to mind the place. Before long people were even saying: “Oh, I know someone who lives there.”

Lily de Chantal, now in her fifties, had decided to give the Dakota a try. Today, she declared, she wouldn’t think of living anywhere else. She’d rented out the house she owned, invested her other savings, and was able to live quietly and pleasantly at the Dakota with a small staff. Her style of life was made all the more comfortable by the fact that Frank Master, discreetly, paid half the rent.