"I wouldn't do it," Mr. Usher said. "Let her work, let her work with her 'ands. A big, strapping girl like her, it won't hurt her. Why, my Missis there could turn out your little doll-'ouse in a hour. Don't you take no gentlemen lodgers. Don't you let her do it, Randall, my boy, or there'll be trouble."
The advice came too late. That very evening Violet informed her husband that she had let the rooms.
And while Ranny raged she assured him that it was all right. She had done exactly what he had told her. She had let them to a friend of his—Leonard Mercier.
CHAPTER XIX
She gathered from his silence that it was all right. Not a muscle of Ranny's face betrayed to her that it was all wrong.
Ever since his marriage he had kept Leonard Mercier at a distance. He had had to meet him, of course, and Violet had had to meet him, now and again at dinner or supper in his father's house; but Ranny was not going to let him hang round his own house if he could help it. When Jujubes suggested dropping in on a Sunday, Ranny assured him that on Sundays they were always out. And Mercier had met the statement with his atrocious smile. He understood that Randall meant to keep himself to himself. Or was it, Mercier wondered, his young wife that he meant to keep?
And wondering, he smiled more atrociously than ever. It pleased him, it excited him to think that young Randall regarded him as dangerous.
But Randall did not regard him as dangerous in the least. To Ranny, Jujubes, in his increasing flabbiness, was too disgusting to be dangerous. And his conversation, his silly goat's talk, was disgusting, too. Ranny had thought that Violet would find Jujubes and his conversation every bit as disagreeable as he did.
Even now, while some instinct warned him of impending crisis, he still regarded Leonard Mercier as decidedly less dangerous than disgusting. He wasn't going to have the flabby fellow living in his house. That was all; and it was enough.