“He don’t care. When he have headache he don’t care for devil. You can wait, you can go, it is the same.” And then she disdainfully fluttered the big leaves she had been turning slowly.
“Will you be good enough to tell him,” said Leslie in a tight controlled way, “that Miss Parrish, that Miss Leslie Parrish is here?”
The girl looked up.
“No,” she answered, “I do not wish to have the book push through the air at me—so—” (she made a hitchy, overhead girl-gesture of throwing) “and he do not care who you are. Why should he care who you are?” she ended, her eyes now on Leslie and boring into Leslie. It was almost like a movie!
“Really—” broke out Leslie, and then she stopped and shrugged her shoulders and walked over to stand by a window that had a row of century plants on its sill. And here she hummed to pretend that the whole matter was beneath her notice, but she tapped her foot and I knew that she was angry.
Then we waited, and I never felt as if I did so much waiting as I did then, although the waiting wasn’t stretched across more than half an hour. It was stretched tightly, and that makes all the difference!
At last the inner door opened—we came to call what lay behind that door “The Torture Chamber”—and a woman came flouncing out. After her passing, a little man with stiff, coarse hair which stood straight up from his head, and a waxed mustache, paced up and down inside the little room. He looked as if he should be wearing a red uniform trimmed with gilt braid and snapping a short, limber whip at crouching lions; I’ve seen dozens just like him in cages!
“Temperamental!” Leslie whispered, and she was right!
“Fascinating,” Viola answered, in the same kind of a low, highly charged wheeze. Then we waited some more.
At last Signor Paggi came to the door and stared at us.