“I suppose she will,” I said wearily.
“Of course she will. She can’t last long. She’s over seventy, and she was a beauty once; you wouldn’t think it.”
I groaned, remembering those old eyes with red, lashless lids; that mouth with the infantile, pearly false teeth.
We crossed Lamb’s Conduit Street. In Chapel Street, Wood, who was a decentish fellow and always in low water, had two back rooms on the second floor at No. 8.
“I’m going in here to get a whisky,” I said, none too graciously, to Orion.
He put out his hand. His face, with the weak mouth and watery eyes, looked quite haggard in the moonlight which speared down into the narrow street. He bore a horrible family likeness to Mrs. Grigg.
Did I mention that he was a thin fellow? He had a straggling, straw-colored mustache and his skin matched it. Everything about him was ill-hung and undecided. With his yellow face, yellow hair, fawn-colored overcoat and soft hat, he looked as if he had been just flipped into a weak solution of saffron and drawn out again. Why will fair men persist in wearing fawn?
“When she dies,” he went on, “that house in Great Ormond Street will be mine; that and a snug bit—the old girl banks at Barclay’s. She hasn’t got a relation in the world but me. Some sort of second cousin of Grigg’s used to live with her, but they rowed; she’d row with an archangel. I don’t know where Clara Citron—that was the cousin’s name—is now.”
“Well, good-night, old fellow,” I said.
“Wait a bit. You see property’s going up at such a devil of a rate in Bloomsbury. The house alone will bring in a tidy income, let out in flats. I shall do it up and charge good rents and keep it select. Everything on the square, you know.”