“It’s a dreadful liar!” said Grace.
“My grandfather used to have one just like it, with a basket of fruit painted on the door,” said Atwood, advancing toward Grace, beaming with gratitude for her response to his attempt to promote conversation. He was short, plump and blond, with thin fair hair already menaced by baldness. He was not far advanced in the twenties and looked very much like an overgrown school boy. Grace appraised him as a person of kindly impulses and possibly not wholly without common sense.
Having planted himself beside Grace he remarked further upon clocks and their general unreliability, while he rolled his eyes first toward Cummings and then in the direction of the lady in the fur coat. Grace had already assumed without the aid of this telegraphy that the lady was Bob’s wife. Atwood seemed to be appealing to Grace to assist him in terminating a situation that was verging upon the intolerable, but she was unable to see that it was incumbent upon her to take the initiative. But Mrs. Cummings might sit there forever unless something happened. Bob continued to wear the look of one condemned and awaiting the pleasure of the executioner. Grace felt strongly moved to walk up to him and shake him. She had read of such unfortunate meetings between husband and wife and they were usually attended with furious denunciations and sometimes with pistols. Without the sustaining presence of Atwood she would have retired to the domestic end of the McGovern establishment and waited for the storm to blow over, but the storm, if such impended, was slow in developing.
“This can’t last forever,” said Grace in a low tone.
“If something doesn’t happen in a minute I’m a dead man,” Atwood whispered.
“I think it would be nice if we all got acquainted. I’m Miss Durland, Mr. Atwood,” said Grace in a tone audible throughout the room.
“Thank you so much! I was just dying to know your name!” he declared fervidly. “Oh, Evelyn——”
Evelyn lifted her head and looked at him defiantly, but he squared himself and said:
“Mrs. Cummings, Miss Durland. I really supposed you had met before.”
His voice rose to an absurd squeak as he expressed this last hopeful sentiment.