"What's the hurry?"
"Good heavens, Preston; if she stays there much longer she'll become a nun!"
"Suppose she does?" asked Newberry, who was a Presbyterian. "I'm surprised to hear you refer to a pious life as if it were a smash-up."
Nevertheless, in the end, he agreed that Muriel should pass the present winter under his hospitable roof ("Though, further than that," he mentally vowed, "I'll be damned if I endure"). So, Muriel had, without too much effort on her guardians' part, been taken about with them on numerous occasions lately, most recently to the Metropolitan, where Stainton had met her.
It was on the morning after this meeting that, with commendable promptness, but at a deplorably early hour—to be exact, at eleven o'clock—Stainton called at the Newberrys'. His card was presented to Mrs. Newberry through the crack of the door while that good lady was in her bath.
Ethel, who was big, blonde, and bovine, struggled into the nearest dressing-gown and hurried to the breakfast-room, where her husband, over a newspaper, was engaged in his matutinal occupation of scolding the coffee. Her face a tragic mask, Mrs. Newberry placed the offending pasteboard by Preston's plate.
"Preston," said she. "Look at that. Look at it!"
Newberry appeared shorter and thinner than ever as he sat crumpled over the newspaper, his grey moustache short and thin and his head covered by grey hair, short and thin and worn in a bang. He obeyed his wife's request. He expressed no surprise.
"Looks like somebody's card," he said.
"It is, Preston," wailed his wife. "It is that awful western person's that George Holt would drag to our box—our box—last night."