LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

accent that wasn’t Washington but wasn’t any place else in particular. At least it wasn’t Southern. And what Buck had said was entirely true. She was a very high-class little lady indeed, as charming and simple as the neatly fitting navy faille summer suit she wore, dainty and young and as fresh as her lawn blouse with its tiny turned-down collar and fetching blue velvet bow.

      I pushed the door open and picked up one of her bags. “Come in,” I said. I thought she hesitated for a moment, picking up the other two, but I could have been wrong.

      “Would you like to go up to your room now?”

      “Maybe we’d better talk things over first,” she said, a little primly. I said “All right,” a little surprised but more amused, and led the way into my living room. I switched on the light. The dusk was deepening in the garden, painting the old brick wall a soft lovely purple. I pushed Sheila, my Irish setter, off the sofa. She knows better than to be there but she’s getting too deaf to hear the front door open any more. I gave the cushions a perfunctory brush.

      “Mother never allows dogs on the furniture,” Ginny Dolan said. “She says they get hair all over people.”

      Perhaps that was why she didn’t at once sit down. She stood just inside the door looking around her, not rudely but with a kind of objective interest that certainly included the works. Then she took a chair, not the sofa, and sat down, her feet in tailored blue leather pumps crossed in front of her.

      “You’re a friend of Mr. Buck’s, aren’t you?” she asked.

      I hated to start lying to the girl right off the bat, but then I remembered things had changed. She was being so polite and so very nice about it that I’d have had to pervert the truth in any case. I nodded.

      “He said you had a very nice house,” she said.

      “Home, surely.” I corrected her I thought with considerable urbanity. I know Sergeant Buck’s semantics too well to believe he’d ever confuse those two terms.

      She looked a little surprised, but not much. “That’s right, he did say that,” she said. “I guess you read his letter. Anyway, I’m new in Washington, of course, but Mother said it was important for me to live in the right place and not to take it for more than one night if I didn’t like it.”

      I saw it was too bad I hadn’t read Mr. Buck’s letter. I might even have been a little annoyed, if Miss Ginny Dolan hadn’t been so patently in earnest and so totally without malice of any kind.

      “And it seems very nice.” She looked around the room again. “Of course, we have all modern furniture, in Taber City.”

      It was my plain stupidity that made my jaw drop at that point. I like to think I’ve become pretty inured to minor shocks. That one wasn’t minor. How I’d missed the connection between the yellow chick’s home town and the Brent-Vair locus of contention seems hard to understand. Buck had certainly made it clear. She’d never been out of Taber City more than once or twice. I could hear him saying it. Looking at her, beautifully poised and as perfectly dressed as a teen-model for a first-rate Fifth Avenue specialty shop, it was hard to believe—unless I’d underestimated Taber City. I hadn’t made the connection in any way.

      But, of course, it didn’t necessarily mean she knew Taber City’s Hot Rod representative on Capitol Hill. It must be a fairly good-sized place—it had a newspaper anyway. I could see “—TY GAZ—” on the center fold of the paper she had under the bag in her lap. At least, I hoped she didn’t know Hamilton Vair. I’d had plenty of him that day to last me indefinitely.

      She’d seen my jaw drop. She could hardly have helped it. “I don’t mean this isn’t all right,” she said gently. “Only, Mother says you only live once and you might as well have a little comfort while you’re at it.—But a boy in the taxi said this was a good neighborhod,” she added then, with a small tinge of complacency. “I met him on the train. He’s very nice, Eastern, sort of, but very friendly. I told him a friend of Daddy’s had got me a room here.”

      She turned her blue eyes from the picture of my sons on the table. She’d been examining them with enough interest to make me glad—even at this point—that they were safely out of Washington.

      “He said it was a very nice place. He said he used to know a boy who lived here once and he got along all right. He thought I’d get along okay if I didn’t stay out too late. You’re very strict, he said.”

      I could see now why Archie Seaton had thought it was all so funny.

      “Now, about how much I’m supposed to pay,” she said, really getting down to some small but solid brass tacks. “Mother said I wasn’t to let myself be gypp—be overcharged. She said Mr. Buck oughtn’t to get anything—you know, any commission because he’s supposed to be a friend of Daddy’s. Daddy’ll take care of him. Now, how much do you think it ought to be, Mrs. Latham? Of course, I’ve got a job, and I’d like to live on it.—But I don’t really have to. Money doesn’t make any difference to Daddy. He’s the sheriff of Taber County.”

      She brightened again and went on without giving me the chance to answer her.

      “You didn’t know I got my job in a contest, did you? a talent show? You had to know how to type, of course. That was one of the entrance requirements. But you had to have talent. I danced.”

      She gave me an incredibly lovely flower-like smile. “Of course”—she didn’t exactly shrug but the effect was the same—“I’d have gotten it anyway. We all knew that. It was all set when I graduated from High School in February. Daddy didn’t like it very much, but you know Mother. She thought I’d have a better chance of meeting people in Washington than I would in Taber. She doesn’t go for my boy friend. He’s all right, but . . . you know.” She smiled again. “His father’s a big oil man in Taber. He’s very rich. But Mother says a girl has to look around. Daddy says he’d rather be a big frog in a little pond, but that’s not the way Mother looks at it.”

      She took one glove off and was starting on the other when she caught herself and became seriously business-like a second time. “Oh,” she said. “Mother told me I wasn’t to take the room unless it had kitchen and laundry privileges with it. She says if I paid a quarter to use the washing machine. . . .”

      “I’ll see what we can manage, Ginny,” I said hastily.

      She took the other glove off. “But you haven’t told me how much.”

      I got up. “Sergeant Buck has taken care of that,” I said. I was about to add I didn’t think she’d really be there for very long, but she interrupted me with a peal of laughter, as merry and tinkling as the prisms on the mantel lustres when they’re moved by the evening breeze.

      “Won’t Daddy and Mother simply die!” she said. “They haven’t seen Mr. Buck for ever so long, and Daddy was sure the kind of lady he’d know is the kind of lady I shouldn’t. But you know Mother, she made him write the letter just the same. She said Mr. Buck would probably own half a dozen boarding houses himself now, and we’d get ever so much better rates. And she didn’t like what Daddy said, because Mr. Buck was a boyfriend of hers once. She’d have married him if she hadn’t met Daddy.”

      I’d heard Colonel Primrose say Sergeant Buck has led a charmed life.

      Ginny stopped laughing, her face suddenly full of apology and real compassion. “Oh, I’m sorry!” she said quickly. “Mother told me to be terribly careful. But you’re not the jealous type, are you? Mother said if she was a widow——”

      The telephone rang then, fortunately. All I hoped was that Sergeant Buck would never, never have to hear what I’d just heard. Ginny Dolan’s mother was rapidly becoming Number One on my list. In fact, at the moment she’d quite taken the place recently vacated by Sergeant Buck. As I picked up the phone and answered it, I wasn’t sure that third place wasn’t held by the young man whose cheerful voice was there in my ear.

      “Hi, Mrs. Latham.” It was Archie Seaton. “Got a room for

Скачать книгу