In spite of James’ expression of mild surprise, the two girls got out and entered the building, searching as they did so for some card or call board by which they might locate Madame La Mar’s rooms. There was no lock system on the doors and no cards of residents. They went on into the main hall and saw a row of uninviting doors, each with some name scrawled on it in pencil. On one door alone was a soiled visiting card bearing the proud name of Madame La Mar.
“Do you dare knock?” asked Katherine.
“Maybe I will in a—in a minute,” hesitated Peggy. “Don’t you think perhaps we’d better have James in?”
“No,” said Katherine, “he’s right out there, anyway, and could hear us if we wanted him for anything, and this apartment must face the street, so we could lean out and call him if it gets too trancified for us in there.”
But they did not have to work up their courage to the point of forcing themselves to knock on the door, for the great Madame La Mar herself, hearing their whispering voices, now threw it open and stood before them in all the magnificence of tight fitting black velvet embroidered with occasional sequins that glittered here and there.
She was a big woman with vivid black eyes and black hair turning in places to gray. Her cheeks bloomed with an unnatural radiance, and her eyebrows were the longest and the most arched and the most charcoal dusky that Peggy had ever seen off the stage.
“Ah,” crooned a honeyed voice, “did you want to see me?”
Katherine, speechless, nodded.
“Was it about—did you want a reading?” There was a very professional business-like quality now creeping into the voice in addition to its first honeyed accents.
“Yes,” Peggy answered up.