But the wire brought no answer to that repeated call, and Teddie hung up the receiver. She placed it slowly and carefully on its hook and sat staring at the cadmium tinted wall, with a look of helpless protest on her bewildered young face. And for the second time she found herself face to face with a forlorn and seemingly fruitless survey of her resources.
Once or twice, in her desperation, she was even tempted to pack up and scurry off to Hot Springs in the wake of her Uncle Chandler. But that, she remembered, would be more than cowardly. It would be foolish, for it would be nothing more than a momentary evasion of the inevitable. And besides being a sacrifice of dignity, it would stand as an advertisement of guilt.
Then out of a world that seemed as cold and empty as a glacial moraine came one faint glow of hope. On the gray sky-line of a Sahara of uncertainties appeared a tremulous palm-frond or two. For Teddie, in her misery, had suddenly taken thought of Gerald Rhindelander West. Gerry, she remembered with a gulp, was not only one of her own set, but also a corporation lawyer. It wouldn’t be easy to explain things to Gerry. It would, in fact, involve sacrifices of pride which made her wince without knowing it. But she had talked about having an attorney. And it was her duty to find one.
CHAPTER NINE
When Teddie made ready for her conference with Gerald Rhindelander West she did so with a particularity which might have surprised both her recently abandoned maid and the immediate members of her own family. She went forth to the terra incognita of Nassau Street cuirassed in tailored and braided trimness and gauntleted in spotless kid with just the right array of wrinkles about her glove-tops. She was still further entrenched behind a four-skin scarf of blue-fox—which wasn’t blue at all—and a canteen muff to match, to say nothing of seven cyanitic-looking orchids which completed the color-scheme and fluttered demurely above her slightly fluttering heart.
For it wasn’t often that Teddie was as excited as she found herself that morning, just as it wasn’t often that she had turned to give ponderable thought to the question of armor-plate. But it loomed up before her as a serious matter, this commandeering of a clever young attorney to her side of the case, and she felt the need of not producing an unfavorable impression on Gerry.
Yet even after she had unearthed Gerry’s aerial office-suite in that seldom explored warren of industry known as Nassau Street, she found the attorney in question not quite so accessible as she had anticipated. For she was compelled to send in a card, and cool her heels in an outer room, and even after being admitted to the royal presence had to wait for a further minute or two while Gerry instructed an altogether unnecessarily attractive stenographer as to the procedure in manifolding a somewhat dignified array of documents.
He seemed still preoccupied, in fact, as he seated Teddie in a chair at his desk-end and absently took her muff and put it down and motioned away a secretarial-looking intruder and crisply asked just what he could do for her.
Teddie found it hard to begin. She made two false starts, in fact, before she was able to begin. And then she refused to be further intimidated by the paraded professional dignity of a person who’d once helped her paint zebra-stripes on a Jersey cow.
“Gerry, do you know Raoul Uhlan?” she found herself quite casually inquiring.