With her deadly directness she had gone straight to the point I dreaded.
“Yes, they’ve been in.”
“Did they like it?”
One of the most formidable things about this woman is the way she keeps placing you in positions where you must either lie and lose your self-respect or tell the truth and incur her sudden and alarming anger. I was not afraid of that now, but I couldn’t hurt her. I tried to find a sentence that would be as truthful and painless as the circumstances permitted. The search took a moment.
“They didn’t,” she answered for me.
She turned her face to the window and drummed on the chair-arm with her fingers, then said defiantly:
“They don’t know anything.”
“Of course they don’t,” I cried. “An Italian count, an artist, a model, a woman who rents floors.”
Her eye fell on the green dress.
“Miss Gorringe has been here.”