“Top floor’ll fix me.” Mame it was who spoke, yet with the lofty voice of Miss Amethyst Du Rance. “Tariff’ll be less, I reckon, but”—haughtily detaching a second Bradbury from the wad—“I’ll be most happy to pay spot cash in advance for a fortnight’s board and residence.”
Money is quite as eloquent in London, England, as it is in New York or Seattle or Milpitas, Cal. Mame’s air of affluence combined with a solid backing of notes did the trick, although the well-bred fashion in which a dyed-in-the-wool British landlady glossed over the fact seemed to render it non-existent.
“You have luggage, I presume?”
There was a trunk outside on the taxi.
“The porter will take it up to your room. I will ring for him now.”
Mrs. Toogood suited the word to the action, the action to the word. She was crisp and decisive, final and definite. Mame felt this lady was wasted in private life. She ought to have been in Congress.
IV
FIVE minutes later Miss Amethyst Du Rance and all her worldly goods were assembled in a small musty bedroom at the top of Fotheringay House. It smelt of damp. There was no grate or stove or any means of heating. The floor was shod with a very cold-looking brand of lino. Only a thin layer of cement divided the ceiling from the tiles of the roof—so thin, indeed, that the all-pervading yellow fog could almost be seen in the act of percolating through them.
Mrs. Toogood, who had personally conducted her new guest up three pairs of stairs, lit the gas and drew the curtains across the narrow window. She then informed Miss Du Rance that dinner was at half-past seven, but there would be afternoon tea in the drawing room on the first floor in about half an hour.
Mame took off her coat and hat, removed the stains of travel from a frank and good-humoured countenance, re-did her hair and applied a dab of powder to a nose which had a tendency to freckle; and then she went downstairs. Stirred by a feeling of adventure she forgot how cold she was; also she forgot the chill that had gathered about her heart. London, England, was a long, long way from home. Its climate was thoroughly depressing and the same could be said of its landladies. Whether the climate produced the landladies or the landladies produced the climate she had not been long enough in the island to say.