“Oh, halloa!” he greeted me with the air of an old acquaintance, “didn’t you see the folks?”
On my informing him that I had seen no one but the servant, he exclaimed:
“Oh, that chicken wouldn’t know enough to ask you in! Just follow us. Mother wouldn’t remember to come out.”
I was loth to force my presence on mother, but by this time my hospitable young friend had pulled the portières so strenuously that they parted from the pole, and I was presented willy nilly to the collector of antiquities, who had the angular sharp-cut face and form of a rocking horse. She was seated at a table strewn with books and papers, writing at 20 a rate of speed that convinced me she was in the throes of an inspiration. I forebore to interrupt. My scruples, however, were not shared by her eldest son. He gave her elbow a jog of reminder which sent her pencil to the floor.
“Mother!” he shouted in megaphone voice, “here’s the man next door––the one we get our soup plates from.”
She looked up abstractedly.
“Oh,” she said in dismayed tone, “I thought you had gone. I am very much engaged in writing a paper on modern antiquities.”
I murmured some sort of an apology for my untimely interruption.
“I am so absorbed in my great work,” she explained, “that I am oblivious to all else. I have the rare and great gift of concentration in a marked degree.”
I was quite sure of this fact. She took 21 another pencil from a supply box and resumed her literary occupation. As my presence seemed of so little moment, I lingered.