The door of the outer office opened. Mrs. Cool came barging into the room with a trim-looking chestnut-haired trick a step behind her.

I sized up my new boss as she walked across the office, and revised my first estimate of her weight by adding twenty pounds. She evidently didn’t believe in confining herself to tight clothes. She wiggled and jiggled around inside her loose apparel like a cylinder of currant jelly on a plate. But she wasn’t wheezy, and she didn’t waddle. She walked with a smooth, easy rhythm. It wasn’t a stride. You weren’t conscious of her legs at all. She flowed past like a river.

I looked at the girl behind her, and the girl looked at me.

She was trim-ankled, slender, and seemed to have her body and mind on frightened tip-toes. I had the impression that if I’d yell “Boo!” at the top of my voice, she’d be out of the office in two bounds. She had deep brown eyes, suntanned skin—or powder—and clothes which were cut to show her figure and did. It was a figure worth showing.

Elsie Brand kept right on typing.

Mrs. Cool held open the door of her private office. “Go right on in, Miss Hunter,” she said, and then, looking at me, went on in the same tone of voice, almost as part of the same sentence, “I’m going to want you in five minutes. Wait.”

The door closed.

I made myself as comfortable as possible and waited.

After a while, the telephone on Elsie Brand’s desk buzzed. She stopped typing, picked up the receiver, said, “Very well,” dropped the receiver back into place, and nodded at me. “Go on in,” she said. She was back pounding the keys of the typewriter before I’d got out of the chair.

I opened the door to the private office. Mrs. Cool was overflowing the big swivel chair as she sat hunched up against the desk, her elbows leaning on it. As I opened the door, she was saying, “—no, dearie, I don’t give a damn now how much you lie. We find out the truth sooner or later anyway; and the longer it takes to find out the truth, the more time we get paid for—this is Donald Lam. Mr. Lam, Miss Hunter. Mr. Lam hasn’t been with me long, but he has the qualifications. He’ll work on your case. I’ll supervise what he does.”

I bowed to the girl. She smiled at me in a preoccupied way. She seemed to be hesitating over some important decision.