"You didn't give me a chance, Mr. Robert."
"Show him in, Timmy, show him in. Oh, merciful Heaven, do fairy-tales come true?"
Mr. Lange was rather like one of the Norman pillars of Notre Dame. Just as round, just as high, just as solid and just as dependable-looking. Far away at the top of this great round solid erect pillar his face shone with friendly rectitude.
"Mr. Blair?" he said. "My name is Lange. I apologise for bothering you"-he failed to manage the TH-"but it was important. Important to you, I mean. At least, yes I think."
"Sit down, Mr. Lange."
"Thank you, thank you. It is warm, is it not? This is perhaps the day you have your summer?" He smiled on Robert. "That is an idiom of the English, that joke about one-day summer. I am greatly interested in the English idiom. It is because of my interest in English idiom that I come to see you."
Robert's heart sank to his heels with the plummet swoop of an express lift. Fairy-tales, indeed. No; fairy-tales stay fairy-tales.
"Yes?" he said encouragingly.
"I keep a hotel in Copenhagen, Mr. Blair. The hotel of the Red Shoes it is called. Not, of course, because anyone wears red shoes there but because of a tale of Andersen, which you perhaps may—"
"Yes, yes," Robert said. "It has become one of our tales too."