Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/118

108 there had been altogether too much of that sort of thing. "Good afternoon," she repeated with frappéd finality, as she opened the door and swung it wide, with her back against the wall.

She stood there, even after he had bowed himself pompously out, with a frown of perplexity on her smooth young brow and a weight on her troubled young heart. She felt like a harried front-liner whose supports have failed to come up. She felt like a thirty-footer being pounded by a big and brutal Atlantic. She felt like a hothouse orchid that had been blown out of a coupelet window and was being trampled on by all the heels and run over by all the wheels of Fifth Avenue.

She was awakened from that little reverie of self-pity by the repeated shrill of her telephone bell. So she crossed wearily to her desk and took up the receiver.

"This is Ruby Reamer speakin'," said the voice over its thread of metal, "and I guess I've got considerable speakin' to do with you."