“Tush!” said Mr. Iff contemptuously. “I referred poetically to the fine Italian hand of Cousin Arbuthnot Ismay. Now if I were you, I’d agitate that hook until Central answers, and then ask for the manager and see if he can trace that call back to its source. It oughtn’t to be difficult at this hour, when the telephone service is at its slackest.”
He fancied that he detected a faint, abrupt sound, like a muffled sob
X
DEAD O’ NIGHT
Beneath a nature so superficially shallow that it shone only with the reflected lustre of the more brilliant personalities to which it was attracted, Mrs. Ilkington had a heart—sentiment and a capacity for sympathetic affection. She had met Eleanor Searle in Paris, and knew a little more than something of the struggle the girl had been making to prepare herself for the operatic stage. She managed to discover that she had no close friends in New York, and shrewdly surmised that she wasn’t any too well provided with munitions of war—in the shape of money—for her contemplated campaign against the army of professional people, marshalled by indifferent-minded managers, which stood between her and the place she coveted.
Considering all this, Mrs. Ilkington had suggested, with an accent of insistence, that Eleanor should go to the hotel which she intended to patronise—wording her suggestion so cunningly that it would be an easy matter for her, when the time came, to demonstrate that she had invited the girl to be her guest. And with this she was thoughtful enough to select an unpretentious if thoroughly well-managed house on the West Side, in the late Seventies, in order that Eleanor might feel at ease and not worry about the size of the bill which she wasn’t to be permitted to pay.