Why, it was quite probable that even Zenda would not remember her if he saw her again. Then her throat seemed to thicken up a trifle. That was not so, because Morris Beiner had told her that not only had Zenda remembered her first name but had been able to describe her so accurately that Beiner had recognized her from the description.
But, at the moment, she had nothing to fear. She looked at the card Miss Henderson had given her. There were half a dozen addresses written on it. The rentals placed opposite them ranged from five to twelve hundred.
"How much did you wish to pay, Mr. Grannis?" she asked.
Grannis started as she spoke. He stared at her; his brows furrowed. Clancy felt herself growing pale. Then Grannis smiled.
"I meet so many people—oh, thousands, Miss Deane—that I'm always imagining that I've met my newest acquaintance before. I haven't met you, have I?"
The direct lie was something that Clancy abhorred, hardly ever in her life had she uttered one.
She compromised between the instinct for self-preservation and a rigid upbringing by shaking her head. He accepted the quasi-denial with a smile, then answered her question.
"Oh, six or eight hundred a month—something like that," he said carelessly.
Clancy smothered a gasp. Miss Henderson had told her nothing of the details of the business. That had been careless to an extreme of Miss Henderson. Yet Clancy supposed that Miss Henderson felt that, if an employee didn't have common sense, she wouldn't retain her. Still, not to have told Clancy that these rentals marked on this card were by the month, instead, as Clancy had assumed, by the year, was to have relied not merely on Clancy's possession of common sense but on her experience of New York. But Miss Henderson didn't know that Clancy had just come from the country. Probably sending Clancy out offhand in this fashion had been a test of Clancy's adaptability for the business. Well—and her chin stuck forward a bit—she'd show that she had that adaptability. If Grannis were willing to pay six or eight hundred dollars a month for an apartment, she'd rent him one.
She handed the card to Grannis.