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of the Chicago Tribune. He had given it as a wedding present to his niece, Trini, who had married Corty Barnes, whose family lived right next door just till a couple of years ago. This is the Barnes of Barnes and Noble. I had been in this house at cocktail parties and didn't recognize it. The Barnes's wanted to get out, so I bought the house, as I remember, for $20,000 cash. I rushed around to the Bankers Trust, which was on Fifty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue, right opposite our offices, and boasted to Mr. Briscoe, the vice-president, that I had just--I was wildly elated--bought a house at Sixty-second Street in a wonderful neighborhood for $20,000 and had he ever heard of anything like this. Briscoe said, “You bought a house? Why didn't you tell us that you wanted a house? We would have given you one.” The banks owned all of the houses nearly. Everybody was short of cash at that time. Most of the houses around here were used for immoral purposes. That was all they could do with them. They would sell them to madams who would pay cash. There were raids going on at all of these marblelined houses during the War. They were a drug on the market all during World War Two. Of course, when property started going up, these houses became highly desirable again. They're invaluable right now. We probably could sell for twenty times what we paid for the place in 1941!

To get back to Phyllis, how did she react to meeting your authors?