It was one of the top-floor-rear flats in the Wyan-dotte, not merely biggest of Washington's apartment hotels, but also " most exclusive "- which is the elegant way of saying most expensive. The Wyandotte had gone up before landlords grasped the obvious truth that in a fire-proof structure locations farthest from noise and dust should and could command highest prices; so Joshua Craig's flat was the cheapest in the house. The ninety dollars a month loomed large in his eyes, focused to little-town ideas of values; it was, in fact, small for shelter in " the de luxe district of the de luxe quarter," to quote Mrs. Senator Mulvey, that simple, far-Western soul, who, finding snobbishness to be the chief distin guishing mark of the Eastern upper classes, assumed it was a virtue, acquired it laboriously, and practiced it as openly and proudly as a preacher does piety. Craig's