"Oh, but there is, though. I've got--I've got no friends--not so much
as a father or a mother. I never did have. I was--I was left in a
basket on a door-step---twenty-three years ago--and brought up in an
orphans' home in Texas. There, you've got it straight! I've passed you
up the one and only dope on Harry Drinkwater, and any guy that's afraid
he can't be my friend without wearing a dress-suit to breakfast--"
It was so delicate a method of telling me that I was as good as he was
that it seemed best to let the subject of our future relations drop.
They would settle themselves when I had carried out the plan that had
already begun to dawn in me.
*CHAPTER VII*
Miss Goldie Flowerdew, for that was the name on our note of
introduction, was at home, but kept us waiting in a room where I made my
first study of a rooming-house. It was another indication of what I had
_not_ been in my past life that a rooming-house was new to me.
This particular room must in the 'sixties have been the parlor of some
prim and prosperous family. It was long, narrow, dark, with dark
carpets, and dark coverings to the chairs. Dark pictures hung on dark
walls, and dark _objets d'art_ adorned a terrifying chimneypiece in
black marble. Folding-doors shut us off from a back room that was
probably darker still; and through the interstices of the shrunken
woodwork we could hear a vague rustling.
The rustling gave place to a measured step, which finally proceeded from
the room and sounded along the hall, as if taken to the rhythm of a
stone march like that in "Don Giovanni," when the statue of the
Commander comes down from its pedestal. My companion and I
instinctively stood up, divining the approach of a Presence.
The Presence was soon on the threshold, doing justice to the epithet.
The statue of the Commander, dressed in the twentieth-century style of
sweet sixteen and crowned by a shock of bleached hair of tempestuous
wave, would have looked like Miss Goldie Flowerdew as she stood before
us majestically, fingering our note of introduction.
"So she's not coming," was her only observation, delivered in a voice so
deep that, like Mrs. Siddons's "Will it wash?" it startled.
"Did you expect her?" I ventured to say.