Bushwick leaned back in his chair, with his eyes still on Verrian’s profile. “As much as Miss Macroyd could tell me.”
“Ah, I’m still in the dark,” Verrian politely regretted, but not with a tacit wish to wring Miss Macroyd’s neck, which he would not have known how to account for.
“Well, she says that Mrs. Westangle has a professional assistant who’s doing the whole job for her, and that she came down on the same train with herself and you.”
“Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for herself and maid at the station?” Verrian demanded, in a burst of rage, “and left us to get here the best way we could?”
Bushwick grinned. “She supposed there were other carriages, and when she found there weren’t she hurried the victoria back for you.”
“You think she believes all that? I’m glad she has the decency to be ashamed of her behavior.”
“I’m not defending her. Miss Macroyd knows how to take care of herself.”
The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a pipe he took from his pocket and lighted it. After the first few whiffs he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian, said, “Who was your fair friend?”
If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it with the burden of any sort of reserve or contrivance on his soul. “This afternoon?” Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, “That was she.” Then he went on, wrathfully: “She’s a girl who has to make her living, and she’s doing it in a new way that she’s invented for herself. She has supposed that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a money consideration. She’s not a guest in the house, and she won’t take herself on a society basis at all. I don’t know what her history is, and I don’t care. She’s a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I should say she was from the South, for she has the enterprise of the South that comes North and tries to make its living. It’s all inexpressibly none of my business, but I happen to be knowing to so much of the case, and if you’re knowing to anything else, Mr. Bushwick, I want you to get it straight. That’s why I’m talking of it, and not because I think you’ve any right to know anything about it.”
“Thank you,” Bushwick returned, unruffled. “It’s about what Miss Macroyd told me. That’s the reason I don’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”