“But don’t you feel, my dear,” she went on with quiet venom in her voice, “that a great deal of his success has depended on that bandy-legged little she-secretary of his?”
“Is she that wonderful?” I asked, trying to seem less at sea than I was.
“She’s certainly wonderful to him!” announced the woman known as Slinkie. And having driven that 348 poisoned dart well into the flesh, she was content to drop her cigarette-end into the ash-receiver, reach for her blue-fox furs, and announce that she’d have to be toddling on to the hair-dresser’s.
Lois Murchison’s implication, at that moment, didn’t bother me much, for I had bigger troubles to occupy my thoughts. But the more I dwell on it, the more I find myself disturbed in spirit. I resent the idea of being upset by a wicked-tongued woman. She has, however, raised a ghost which will have to be laid. To-morrow I intend to go down to my husband’s office and see his secretary, “to inspect the whaup,” as Whinnie would express it, for I find myself becoming more and more interested in her wonderfulness.... Peter sent me a hurried line or two to-day, telling me to sit tight as he thought he’d have news for me before the week was out.
I suspect him of trying to trick me into some forlorn new lease of hope. But I have pinned my faith to Peter—and I know he would not trifle with anything so sacred as mother-love.
Saturday the Seventh
There is no news of my Dinkie.... But there is news of another nature.
Between ten and eleven this morning I had Hilton motor me down to Duncan’s office in Eighth Avenue. It struck me as odd, at first, that I had never been there before. But Duncan, I remembered, had never asked me, the domestic fly, to step into his spider’s parlor of commerce. And I found a ridiculous timidity creeping over me as I went up in the elevator, and found the door-number, and saw myself confronted by a cadaverous urchin in horn-rimmed specs, who thrust a paper-covered novel behind his chair-back and asked me what I wanted. So I asked him if this was Mr. McKail’s office.