“No!”
“Accomplice, flunkey, Secretary of War, hireling, comrade...” He was on his way out to the elevator. I tossed the snapshot onto my desk and went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
Chapter 2
You’re late,” I told the girls reproachfully as I showed them into the office. “Mr. Wolfe supposed you would be here at six o’clock, when he comes down from the plant rooms, and it’s twenty after. Now he’s gone to the kitchen and started operations on some corned beef hash.”
They were sitting down and I was looking them over.
“You mean he’s eating corned beef hash?” Maryella Timms asked.
“No. That comes later. He’s concocting it.”
“It’s my fault,” Janet Nichols said. “I didn’t get back until after five, and I was in riding clothes and had to change. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t look much like a horseback rider. Not that she was built wrong, she had a fairly nice little body, with good hips, but her face was more of a subway face than a bridle-path face. Naturally I had been expecting something out of the ordinary, one way or another, since according to Bess Huddleston she was an anonymous letter writer and had thought up the Stryker dwarf and giant party, and to tell the truth I was disappointed. She looked more like a school teacher — or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she looked like what a school teacher looks like before the time comes that she absolutely looks like a school teacher and nothing else.
Maryella Timms, on the other hand, was in no way disappointing, but she was irritating. Her hair started far back above the slant of her brow, and that made her brow look even higher and broader than it was, and noble and spiritual. But her eyes were very demure, which didn’t fit. If you’re noble and spiritual you don’t have to be demure. There’s no point in being demure unless there’s something on your mind to be demure about. Besides, there was her accent. Cawned beef ha-a-sh. I am not still fighting the Civil War, and anyway my side won, but these Southern belles — if it sounds like a deliberate come-on to me then it does. I was bawn and braht up in the Nawth.