Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/196

184 night magic. That night, I remembered, wasn't to be judged as you judge an ordinary night of life. It was a sort of Grimm's fairy-tale with tassels on. It was a sort of nursery-rhyme on wheels. For I'd already been through the Cinderella rôle, with the startled Prince finding the lost slipper and returning it to its owner,—though, of course, an eight-cylinder limousine could never quite take the place of a pumpkin shell coach.

If my Prince had turned into Aladdin the tailor's son, and insisted on rubbing his magic lamp, it was not for me to rub my eyes and question his power. I was too tired to think, and too hungry to haggle over details. And the whole thing seemed a sort of Arabian Nights' adventure where the City of Spot-Cash had got strangely tangled up with the City of Brass, and Broadway and Central Park badly mixed with Bagdad, with the Tigris twisting down past the Palisades where the Hudson ought to have been.

It was Wendy Washburn himself—still insisting on taking it all as a matter of course—who promptly brought me back to earth.

"Don't you think it would be as well to slip off that heavy coat?" he inquired.

He held it up as I wriggled out of it.

"One gets so used to fur," I announced, for he