CHAPTER XX
WALLINGFORD BEGINS TO UTILIZE THE WONDERFUL
ETRUSCAN BLACK MUD
Wallingford was just going in to dinner when a tall, thin-visaged young lady, who might have been nearing thirty, but insisted on all the airs and graces of twenty, came boldly up to the Atlas Hotel in search of him, and, by her right of being a public character, introduced herself. She was Miss Forsythe, principal over one other teacher in the Blakeville public school; moreover, she was president of the Women’s Culture Club!
“It is about the latter that I came to see you, Mr. Wallingford,” she said, pushing back a curl which had been carefully trained to be wayward. “The Women’s Culture Club meets this coming Saturday afternoon at the residence of Mrs. Moozer. It just happens that we are making an exhaustive study of the Italian Renaissance, and we have nothing, positively nothing, about the renaissance of Italian ceramics! I beg of you, Mr. Wallingford, I plead with you, to be our guest upon that afternoon and address us upon Etruscan Pottery.”
Wallingford required but one second to adjust himself to this new phase. This was right where he lived. He could out-pretend anybody who ever made pretensions to having a pretense. He expanded his broad chest and beamed.
He knew but little about art, being only the business man of the projected American Etruscan Black Pottery Studios, but he would be more than pleased to tell them that little. He would, in fact, be charmed!
“You don’t know how kind, how good you are, and what a treat your practical talk will be, I am sure,” gurgled Miss Forsythe, biting first her upper lip and then her lower to make them redder, and then, still gurgling, she swept away, leaving Wallingford chuckling.
Immediately after lunch he went over to the telegraph office and wired to the most exclusive establishment of its sort in New York:
Express three black pottery vases Etruscan preferred but most expensive you have one eighteen inches high and two twelve inches high am wiring fifty dollars to insure transportation send balance C. O. D.