“You reassure me,” smiled the caller. “But don’t go too far. Don’t, for instance, imagine me the attorney of a maiden aunt, come to hand over a handsome legacy. And don’t read pure altruism in my countenance. I——” He began to laugh. “Shall I say it?”
“If it’s respectable,” said Mrs. Derwall. “You begin to make me ask myself questions.”
“It’s only too respectable, heaven knows! But it’s a little unexpected. It will take your breath away. You may scream. You might even faint. One never can tell what ladies will do. Are you temperamental?”
Mrs. Derwall sniffed. There was that in her sniff however, which intimated that she was not unwilling to hear what her visitor had to impart.
“I like that! Do I look so much like the Eternal Feminine? Do your direst and I promise you not to make a scene.”
“Well, then,” said the caller, “I throw the responsibility on you. I came in to buy your house.”
If faces could fall, as literature popularly affirms, Mrs. Derwall’s would have bumped the floor with some force. As it was she treated her interlocutor to a stare in which the surprise he had predicted mingled with disillusion. She therefore stretched the truth.
“Why, I don’t want to sell my house,” she uttered briefly.
The stranger did not appear to be in the least disconcerted.
“So far, so good. I’ve found out, at any rate, that the house is yours to sell. It might have been somebody else’s. And let me congratulate you on your self-control.”