Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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"When she does," I said, "you'd better send me my food upstairs on a tray."

"You shouldn't be so intolerant," she said. "You know that Mirabel has always been devoted to you. She admires you. Just last winter she wanted to borrow one of your books. There weren't any in the apartment. Has Mr. Northby got something queer about him?"

"Southby," I said. "No, he hasn't."

"Then why don't we have him come Saturday night?"

"No," I said. "He wouldn't understand it here."

"Nonsense," she said. "Everybody always likes it here."

There is a phrase used by certain fiction writers which had always puzzled me. Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim, for example, ends an interview by the curt sentence: "He rose to his feet." It had seemed difficult to understand what else a character could rise to, but in the dining room, while Cousin Clothilde watched me, that expression acquired a definite meaning. Halfway out of my chair, I had a desire to relapse again; it was an effort to rise to my feet, and when I was on them, they moved dreamily. I leaned over and kissed her. She was my father's cousin, but she looked amazingly young.