“Mr. Queerwitz! What a name!” Bobs was soliloquizing as she sat on the back seat of the big, comfortable limousine, and now and then glanced at her preoccupied companion. He was very rich, she decided, but not refined, and yet how strange that a man with unrefined tastes should wish to sell rarely beautiful things and antiques. Mr. Queerwitz was not communicative. In fact, he had tried to protest at the suddenly made arrangement and had declared to Mr. Jewett, in a brief moment when they were alone, that he shouldn’t pay a cent of salary to that “upstart of a girl” unless she did something to really earn it. Mr. Jewett had agreed, saying that he would assume the responsibility; but of this Roberta knew nothing.
They were soon riding down Fifth Avenue in the throng of fine equipages with which she was most familiar, as often the handsome Vandergrift car had been one of the procession.
Bobs felt that she would have to pinch herself as she followed her portly employer into an exclusive art shop to be sure that she was that same Roberta Vandergrift. Then she reminded herself that she must entirely forget her own name if she were to be consistently Dora Dolittle.
How Bobs hoped that she would be successful on this, her first case, that she might be permanently engaged by that interesting looking young man who called himself James Jewett.
CHAPTER VIII.
A NEW FRIEND
At that early hour there were no customers in the shop, but Roberta saw three young women of widely varying ages who were dusting and putting things in order for the business of the day. Mr. Queerwitz went at once to a tall, spare woman of about fifty whose light, reddish hair suggested that the color had been applied from without.
“Miss Peerwinkle,” he said rather abruptly, “here’s the new clerk I was telling you about. You’d better show her the lay of things before it gets busy.”
Miss Peerwinkle turned, and her washed-out blue eyes seemed to look down at Roberta from the great height where, at least, she believed that her position as head saleslady at the Queerwitz antique shop had placed her.
“Your name, Miss?” she inquired when the proprietor had departed toward a rear door labeled “No admittance.”
Bobs had been so amused by all that she had seen that she hardly heard the inquiry, and when at last she did become conscious of it, for one wild moment she couldn’t recall her new name, and so she actually hesitated. Luckily just then one of the girls called to Miss Peerwinkle to ask her about a tag, and in that brief moment Bobs remembered.