“Fine! Thank you ever so much. I’ll buy me a lot of steel with all that money you owe me.”
Marie Louise put up the receiver. People have got so used to the telephone that they can see by it. Marie Louise could visualize Davidge angry with embarrassment, confronting the important man whose office he had desecrated with this silly hammockese. She felt that she had made herself a nuisance and lost a trick. She had taken a deuce with her highest trump and had not captured the king.
Furthermore, to keep Davidge from meeting Lady Clifton-Wyatt would be only to-day’s battle. There would still be to-morrows and the day-afters. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had declared herself openly hostile to Marie Louise, and would get her sooner or later. Flight from Washington would be the only safety.
But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She loved Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman to do important work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace. But she could not live on at Polly Widdicombe’s forever.
Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must find a nook of her own. And she would have to live in it all by herself. Who was there to live with? She felt horribly deserted in life. She had looked at numerous houses and apartments from time to time. Apartments were costlier and fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone, anyway, she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would more easily be kept aloof.
She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented yesterday.
Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr. Hailstorks:
“Well, a carpenter made it––so let it pass for a house. I’ll take it if it has a floor. I’m like Gelett Burgess: ‘I don’t so much care for a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is getting to be quite a bore.’”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.