"Proper! And what is propriety to me, if you please—at my age?" madame demanded indignantly. "Am I not aware that monsieur left my house almost immediately after entering it and spent the night elsewhere? Did I not from my window see him running up the street with his handbag through the rain? But am I to figure as the custodian of my lodgers' morals?" The thought perished, annihilated by an ample gesture. "My quarrel with monsieur is that he left the young woman here alone!"
Matthias found the vernacular the only adequate vehicle of expression: "I've got to hand it to you, Madame Duprat; your point of view is essentially Gallic."
"But what is the explanation of this conduct, monsieur? Am I to look forward to future escapades of the same nature? Do you intend to make of my house a refuge for all the stray unfortunates of New York? Am I, and my guests, to be left to the mercies of God-knows-who, simply because monsieur has a heart of pity?"
"Oh, here!" Matthias broke in with some impatience. "It wasn't as bad as that. It's not likely to happen again ... and besides, the girl was a perfectly good, nice, respectable girl. Madame should know that I wouldn't take any chances with people I didn't know all about."
"Monsieur knew the young woman, then?"
"Oh, yes; assuredly yes," Matthias lied nonchalantly.
By the happiest of accidents, his glance, searching the table for a box of matches wherewith to relight his pipe, encountered a sheet of typewriter paper on which a brief message had been scrawled in a formless, untrained hand:
"Dear Sir," he read with relief, "thank you—Your friend, Joan Thursby."
He found the matches and used one before looking up.
"Miss Thursby," he said coolly, "is the daughter of an eminently respectable family in reduced circumstances. Thinking to better her condition, she proposed to become an actress, but met with such violent opposition on the part of her father—a bigot of a man!—that she was obliged to leave her home in order to retain her self-respect. Quite naturally she thought first of her only friend in the profession, Miss Maizie Dean, and came here to find her. The rest you may imagine. Was I to turn her out to wander through the rain—at two o'clock in the morning? Madame discredits her heart by suggesting anything of the sort!"