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"
    "Think Tm like you?"
    Corey trip-hammered a thumb against his own chest. "You should be like me. This is one guy they don't pin down to a formal promise!"
    "If you'd bathed oftener, maybe you'd get more offers," Bliss grunted disparagingly.
    "And make them have a hard time finding me when the lights go out? That wouldn't be fair. So where were you this afternoon? I wanted to eat with you."
    "I was out getting the headlight. Where d'you suppose?" He opened a dresser drawer, took out a little cubed box, snapped the lid. "What d'you think of it?"
    Corey took it out of the plush, breathed on it admiringly. "Say, is that a rock!"
    "It ought to be. It threw me pul-lenty." Bliss pitched it back in the drawer with an air of indifference that was admirably assumed, started unhitching his suspenders. "I'm going in and take a shower. You know where the Scotch is."
    He came in again in something under twenty minutes, complete down to bat-wing tie. "Who was the dame?" Corey asked idly, looking up from a newspaper.
    "What dame?"
    "The phone rang just now while you were in there, and some girl asked for you. I could tell it wasn't one of your old pals by the way she spoke. 'Does Mr. Kenneth Bliss live there?' I told her you were busy and asked if there was anything I could do. Not another word, just hung up."
    "Strange."
    Corey swiveled his drink. "Maybe it was one of these

    women society reporters looking for stuff on your engagement."
    "No, they usually tackle the girl end of it. Marjorie's people have already given out all the dope there is, anyway. I wonder if it was /ler?" he said after a moment's thought
    "Who's her?"
    Bliss grinned. "I haven't told you, but I think I've got a secret admirer. Funny thing happened not long ago. One night when I was out a beautiful girl tried her level best to get into the apartment here. The doorman told me about it afterward. She wouldn't give her name or anything. He knows most of the crowd I used to hang out with you know how doormen get after a while and he was pretty sure he'd never seen her before. She was all togged out in evening clothes, looked like real carriage trade to his practiced eye. But she didn't drive up to the door, that was the strangest part of it; just came strolling along the street from nowhere, dressed to kill like that.
    "He told me she opened her bag, pretending to hunt for a lipstick or something, and let him get a good look at a hundred-dollar bill floating around on top of everything else. And the way she acted gave him a pretty good idea it would have been his for the asking if he'd just opened my door with his passkey and let her in."
    Corey looked skeptical. "You mean a doorman is going to turn down a chance to make a hundred dollars that easy? He's bulling you."
    "1 don't know about that. The amount is so fantastic in itself that, to me at any rate, it bears the earmark of truth. If he was just making the thing up, he would have been more likely to make it ten or twenty dollars."
    "Well, what'd he do let her in?"
    "I could tell by the way he spoke that the hundred darned near got him; he was just on the point of bringing her up and letting her in. Only he thought he'd better try

    her out first, see if she really knew me, before he went ahead and admitted her. So he strung her along with a fake description that was just the opposite of mine in every respect, and she fell for it, said yes, that was the man proving she'd never seen me before in her life.
    "That finished it, of course; he was afraid to take a chance after that. He pretended he didn't have the key or something and eased her out as tactfully as he could. She was too well dressed for him to get snotty with. When she saw it was no go, she just smiled, shrugged and went sauntering down the street again."
    Corey was leaning interestedly forward by this time. "And are you sure you don't recognize her from his description?"
    "Dead sure. And as I just told you, she didn't recognize me, either."
    "I wonder what