“Then why tell me now?”
“We-ell, we can’t work under cover much longer. Besides, I doubt if there’s much of any fight left in Embree and his crowd.” He peered out through the peep-hole. “They’ve turned it into an experience meeting now,” he remarked. “Then you come on. They’re expecting you. Will you come peaceably or be escorted?”
“Let me keep out of sight until it’s my turn, anyway,” pleaded Jeremy.
So the lawyer, leading him in, established him behind a wing where he was half-hidden, and placed himself as a screen. As he settled himself down, a plump and luxuriously dressed woman at the rear of the hall rose and said austerely:
“I disapprove The Guardian’s local policy. I consider it unfair and prejudiced against—er—ah—against our kind of people. But while we are at war I agree to support it loyally and to deal only with those who support it.”
“Are my eyes playing tricks?” whispered Jeremy in Dana’s ear. “Or is that Mrs. Ambrose Galsworth, who tried to have me blackballed at the Canoe Club?”
“She’s a new member. Wait! There’s worse to come,” chuckled the lawyer.
A little, lean, brisk, twinkling old maid projected herself out of her seat with a jumping-jack effect.
“I never expected to live to see the day I’d speak for The Guardian after they printed that awful political attack on my dear uncle,” she declared. “But the country first! Put down Celia Jenney on your list. And”—her black bright eyes snapped out sparks—“if there’s a store in town that don’t want my trade while this war is on, all it has to do is to take its advertising out of The Guardian and put it into The Fair Dealer—if that’s its silly name.”
“She spends only about fifteen thousand a year in this town,” observed Dana aside to Jeremy.