“Well,” said Audrey, “not what you’d call ‘heard.’ But I’d a sort of a kind of a—”
“You come right over here, young woman.”
“But I want to get my number.”
“You come right over here right now,” Tommy insisted. And in another corner of the entrance-hall she spoke thus, and there was both seriousness and fun in her voice: “Don’t you run away with the idea that I’m taking your leavings, young woman. Because I’m not. We all knew you’d lost your head about Musa, and it was quite right of you. But you never had a chance with Ernest, though you thought you had, after I’d met him. Admit I’m much better suited for him than you’d have been. I’d only one difficulty, and that was the nice boy Price, who wanted to drown himself for my beautiful freckled face. That’s all. Now you can go and get your number.”
The incident might not have ended there had not Madame Piriac appeared in the entrance-hall out of the interior of the hotel.
“He exacted my coming,” said Madame Piriac privately to Audrey. “You know how he is strange. He asks for a quiet wedding, but at the same time it must be all that is most correct. There are things, he says, which demand a woman.... I know four times nothing of the English etiquette. I have abandoned my husband. And here I am. Voilà! Listen. She has great skill with him, cette Tommy. Nevertheless, I have the intention to counsel her about her complexion. Impossible to keep any man with a complexion like hers!”
They saw Mr. Gilman himself enter the hotel. He was very nervous and very important. As soon as he caught sight of Miss Thompkins he said to the door-keeper:
“Tell my chauffeur to wait.”
He was punctiliously attentive to Miss Thompkins, and held her hand for two seconds after he had practically finished with it.
“Are you ready, dear?” he said. “You’ll be sorry to hear that my liver is all wrong again. I knew it was because I slept so heavily.”