“If you want a drink,” she said shortly, “toll the bell.”
Her fiancé limped to the fireplace, dabbed at a button, turned, sank into the depths of a sofa and closed his eyes.
“What a truly leprous day,” he murmured. “Six fly-blown flats and four houses in five and a half hours. An’ I wouldn’t be seen dead in one of them.”
Julia shook back her curls.
“That one in Sloane Street wasn’t so bad,” she said.
“What, the one with the pitch-pine doors and a bathroom like a priest’s hole?”
“They weren’t pitch-pine,” said Julia. “They were maple. Besides, we could easily have them painted. And I don’t like too big a bathroom.”
“Neither do I,” said Hubert Challenger. “But I hate not being able to get off the cork mat. Why, I’ve been in more roomy limousines.”
“I don’t know what you do in a bathroom,” said Julia, “but I usually bathe. So long as there’s room for a tub . . .”
“Ah, that’s the trouble,” said Hubert. “You see, I dry myself too. Sometimes I even go so far as to put on a good-looking vest before bursting once more upon an expectant world.”