The floorwalker smiled deferentially. “Do you find us exorbitant?”
“Do I! I’ll have to pay for this on the installment plan.”
“Ha, ha! Very good. Very good, indeed. Glad we had something that pleased you. Good-afternoon, Miss Frink.”
On the way home the lady gazed at the letter she was carrying.
“John Ogden has beat me to it,” she reflected. At certain moments the lady of the old school found a relief to her feelings in slang. “Saber cuts of Saxon speech,” Mark Twain called it, and Miss Frink liked saber cuts. She hadn’t time to beat about the bush.
Leaving her box below stairs where her secretary and Mrs. Lumbard could if they wished whet their curiosity on its shape and the Ross-Graham label, she went in to lunch with her bonnet on.
The others of her family dutifully took their places. Adèle’s ivory tints were somewhat flushed. She knew from Miss Damon that she had scored a triumph with her invisible audience, and it was a certainty that that meant credit with Miss Frink. She cast an occasional unforgiving glance at the secretary who kept to his usual safe programme of speaking when he was spoken to.
Miss Frink addressed him now. “Here is a letter from John Ogden to our patient,” she said.
Adèle’s brown eyes suddenly glanced up, startled. Still, there were probably hundreds of John Ogdens in the world.
“Yes. I do feel mortified not to have written him as soon as I received his letter of introduction. He will think I’m a savage when he learns why he hasn’t heard from his young friend.” The speaker regarded the letter beside her plate. “He addressed it in care of the store. Mr. Stanwood was headed for Ross Graham’s, you know; and they had no more idea there who Hugh Stanwood was than the man in the moon.”