"Won't you be seated?" she asked. If he had been young and handsome as he was old and plain, Dolly would, without thought of evil, have issued a precisely similar invitation, and the stranger smiled again as he availed himself of it. And seeing that, Dolly smiled once more while she asked him what he wanted to say to her husband about the new yellow.
"I wanted to know, in the first instance, if he really manufactured it," was the reply.
"Oh! yes; quantities," she answered. "He could sell fifty times as much if he had a larger place to make it in. Do you want some?"
"No," said the stranger; "I do not."
Now this puzzled Mrs. Mortomley, and so she tried back.
"What did you want to know in the second instance?" she asked.
"Really, Mrs. Mortomley," he was beginning, when she interrupted him.
"It is of no use your trying to deceive me; you have got something unpleasant to say to my husband—what is it?"
"Well, the fact is, he has no right to be making that yellow."