"By the way, you can't borrow on a
settlement, can you? Isn't there generally some clause against it?" Had
this woman been trying to borrow from him on that settlement? But at
this moment he reached the house, and got out of his cab still undecided
as to how he was going to work the oracle. Impudence, constitutional and
professional, sustained him in saying to the little maid:
"Mrs. Larne at home? Say Mr. Charles Ventnor, will you?"
His quick brown eyes took in the apparel of the passage which served for
hall--the deep blue paper on the walls, lilac-patterned curtains over
the doors, the well-known print of a nude young woman looking over her
shoulder, and he thought: 'H'm! Distinctly tasty!' They noted, too,
a small brown-and-white dog cowering in terror at the very end of the
passage, and he murmured affably: "Fluffy! Come here, Fluffy!" till
Carmen's teeth chattered in her head.
"Will you come in, sir?"
Mr. Ventnor ran his hand over his whiskers, and, entering a room, was
impressed at once by its air of domesticity. On a sofa a handsome woman
and a pretty young girl were surrounded by sewing apparatus and some
white material. The girl looked up, but the elder lady rose.
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