"I haven't heard about it." Miss Partridge's dark, smooth brows lifted.
Did Charles look uneasy, almost guilty, as he stretched out in his armchair and fumbled in the box of cigars?
"You haven't?" Henrietta grinned slyly at Catherine. "Haven't you heard that Mrs. Hammond is renouncing the quiet, domestic life for a real job?"
"Why not say exchanging jobs?" Charles was intent on the end of his cigar.
"Or annexing a second job?" That was Bill's quiet voice.
"I am going to work at the Lynch Bureau," explained Catherine, "as investigator." She felt a flash of delight in the astonishment which rippled briefly over Miss Partridge's smooth face. Knocked down her first impression, she thought maliciously.
"Really? How interesting!" Miss Partridge smiled. "But what will your sweet children do?"
"They'll go to school and have an efficient nurse," said Henrietta abruptly, "and they'll be vastly better off when they aren't having the sole attention of an intelligent woman like their mother. And that's that!" She dangled her glasses over her forefinger. "Did you decide that girl was malingering, Miss Partridge? She certainly had no physical symptoms. Just a case we ran into the other day," she added, to Catherine.
Charles, in answer to a query from Bill, had started a long and eager explanation of an industrial test he had been working up.
Catherine noticed that even as Miss Partridge answered Henrietta's question, her eyes had turned to Charles and Bill. "Is your husband a doctor, too?" she finished.