She shut the door and smiled at him. After all she rather liked his naïve assumption that she had not gone to his room for anything but his assistance in some emergency. It was very charming and boyish and clean and all that. It made things just a little difficult to explain though. "I see you're not in a hurry to go to bed," she said, "so may I sit down and have a cigarette? I've lots to say to you and there has been no other opportunity to-day."
"Of course," he said. "Please do. I hate reading, and sleep is miles away." He placed his chair for her, the only more or less comfortable one in the room, and got a cigarette and lit it. "Awfully nice of you to come in. Well, what's the news?"
He drew up a stiff-backed chair and sat straddle with his arms on the back of it. A good sort, Ida Larpent, he told himself, and extraordinarily picturesque. He couldn't make out why she didn't marry again. She could take her pick.
"Please may I have a pillow? I can feel every rib of cane. It hurts a little. I'm sorry to be fussy."
"Not a bit." He placed one of his pillows behind her back. "How's that?"
"Much better, thanks."
He went back to his chair and sat looking at her with a most friendly and admiring smile.
She liked the last part of it but not the first. It was all more than a little disconcerting. She knew men but not of his type. It would perhaps have been better for men, to say nothing of herself, if she had known one or two. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. She was conscious of looking extremely alluring in her geranium pink peignoir and slippers and her silk nightgown cut very low and her thick, black hair, which fluffed out over her shoulders, rather like that of a Russian prima ballerina.
"There's no news," she said. "The faithful Mrs. Keene gave me a good deal of worry, poor, little soul, and Malcolm Fraser has not been a very entertaining companion. He's by way of not liking me."
Franklin laughed. "Why? He likes everybody."