It was noon when she came back to him, looking older and queerer and whiter faced than ever. Temple Bar is a large office building and Felicia Day had tramped courageously from floor to floor, from office to office, persistently seeking the Portia Person. She had been laughed at, had been almost insulted, had been treated with deference and treated with indifference; she had talked with scores and scores of lawyers, looking searchingly into their faces, asking her question firmly and sweetly. She had asked it of busy lawyers, lazy lawyers, suave lawyers, thin lawyers, fat lawyers, rude lawyers, young lawyers, old lawyers; she had talked to dozens of clerks and stenographers, appealed to elevator men, janitors, scrub women, any one who would listen—she wanted to find the Portia Person, he had curly hair and he was quite tall and he had had a client whose name was Octavia, who was pretty and ill and who had given him some papers sixteen years ago. He had talked with Mademoiselle D'Ormy, in a house in Montrose Place. Of this business that she had for him the little woman was extraordinarily canny, it was no one's affair save hers and the Portia Person's.
The patient girl at the news stand in the main hallway looked up and down a list of tenants, checking them off with an over-manicured finger as she tried to suggest. She had taken charge of Felicia's bag, had offered to keep Babiche. Her good humor shone in a dreary morning. Felicia began to have faith in her.
"If I was you," said the girl, "I'd go get myself a bite to eat. It's noon, everybody's going out—don't you see?"
Felicia saw, she saw also that the patient newsstand girl was tired.
"Do you go to get yourself 'a bite'?" she asked curiously.
"Not till two o'clock," sighed the girl.
"I wish," decided Felicia whimsically, "that Margot had cooked de-licious foods for us—broiled chicken and baked potatoes and a caramel custard and that we could go and sit by the Bowling Green and have Bele bring our lunch out on the little folding table—for you have been most kind to me—"
The girl stared after her in amazement.
"Well, I'll be darned!" she announced frankly to the elevator starter, "that woman is the limit! She's certainly got me guessing! One minute she seems as intelligent as anybody—only she can't remember the name of the man she's looking for—but gee, I forget names myself—and the next minute she's asking me to lunch on Bowling Green, as pleasant as you please! Can you beat it? And I can't for the life of me make out whether she's young or old—her voice's dandy and young. Honest, I like to hear her talk, she talks so comical—but don't she look like the last rose of summer, now don't she?"
The elevator starter agreed that she did and whistled "She May Have
Seen Better Days" till the news-stand girl giggled and told him he was
"Too comical" but they both of them commented about her when she did
not return.