"—Idiots?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch her Parthian shaft. "Because if they were intellectual, logical beings they would know better than to lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative, heartless, dull dolts of men!"
The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's face was a study in immobility. Bingo, after a little more meditation, ponderingly rose and submitted himself to the hands of the attendant. When the Major's toilet had reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his reflections with a sigh.
"Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her ladyship to be good enough to step up here. Tell her that your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I want a little more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will you!"
"O Lord! What a liar I am!" he murmured fervently, addressing his reflection in the glass. His wife's face appeared over his shoulder, bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she adroitly assumed the office vacated by the discarded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance on the scene:
"So you can't get on, it appears, without your blessed idiot?"
"Blessed angel, you mean!" said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out the word!"
"If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, "perhaps I might be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."
"Concernin'——?"
"Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."
"Well, what of her?"