At last Claire appeared in the hall in a very beautiful black velvet gown.
“They’ll be ready by nine o’clock,” she said confidently.
The curtain was to go up at nine. The performers, all except Mrs. Harter, had dined early at the Manor.
She and her husband arrived after dinner.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harter.”
Whatever her gaucheries, Mrs. Harter knew how to enter a room—an art that is not a common one nor—generally—an acquired one. She moved remarkably well.
Harter followed her.
The word “nondescript” is the one that first occurs to me, in attempting to describe him, and the next one is “unwholesome.”
He was a small man, sandy-haired, with a sallow, fretful face and narrow shoulders. He seemed to walk like a cat—almost, but never quite, on the tips of his toes. When his wife, in her abrupt, graceless fashion, said, by way of introduction, “This is Mr. Harter,” he bowed stiffly. Almost at once Mrs. Harter, obviously constrained, suggested that she ought to go and change her dress, and Claire took her away.
I gave Harter a drink.