"'Usbands are hodd duckies," said a voice, accompanying the pat and shake of one of the cushions on the settee where Beatty and Daisy had been sitting. "So they har."
The remark suggested experience, and contained an obvious invitation to confidences. Daisy, her eyes still thoughtful, turned and beheld a hectic sylph, with an insinuating expression and a feather-duster. Hair of an elusive hue was gathered into a cone at the back of her head. At the base of this cone, a piece of white cambric was pinned like a saddle. Frank lengths of mature, brown-stockinged leg, in contour like exclamation-marks, rushed upward, as it were, in hot pursuit of a skirt-hem which they did not succeed in overtaking until it had nearly reached the sylph's knee. She had a long chin, and lips that were pursed, not into a line, but into a kind of mincing rosette.
"Ar, ee—yes—s", she pursued. The way she held her mouth made "yes" a hard word to get through that puckered aperture. She undulated like an ostrich-neck for a moment, then came to attention, with her head on one side, and a hand primping cautiously at her coiffure. Her eyes had fixed themselves on Daisy's "ring-finger", innocent of any certifying circlet of gold.
"'Usbands har queer," she repeated; her glance, after a short sharp sketch of Daisy's figure, coming to rest on the girl's face, "arn't they?"
Daisy Nixon had knocked around quite a little in Toddburn district, and was familiar with most local types of both sexes; but the bearer of the feather-duster refused to be classified offhand in her mind. Cautiously, and with the feeling of one patting a strange dog, she responded:
"Are they?"
"Maybe, an' maybe not," said the other, enigmatically, "you carn't never say. Arsk them as knows." With this, the sylph transferred her glance from Daisy's face to Daisy's finger; then from finger to face; then back to finger; then back to face; and so on, ostentatiously, three or four times. Her cheeks, that, when she came into the room looked as though she had been running hard, gave still the same impression; though Daisy noticed that the rest of her face was a cool and floury white.
There came a ring, at this moment, from the telephone in the hall. Duster and all, Daisy's vis-a-vis, moving with a queer lateral toss of her hips that made their obvious breadth more than ever noticeable, serpentined to answer the call. Returning after a moment, she said:
"Bob—er—Mr. Markey, 'e wants to see you, in the office. Straightaway, 'e says."
Wondering a little at this peremptory summons, Daisy went downstairs. She stepped a little diffidently across the dingy rotunda to the counter. There she found, leaning with an elbow on the edge of the register, a man slightly older than Beatty. He had a vest with do-funnys on the pockets; a coat broad-striped, snug at the waist, sharp-lapelled, and tight-shouldered. He had a face dappled with red. He was newly-barbered—shaved to the blood.