Page:Biggers and Ritchie - Inside the Lines.djvu/118

 one of professional wheedling, for she saw three entering the door. Almer lifted his voice angrily:

"Josepha, your mother is substituting with these cigars. Take them back and tell her if I catch her doing this again it means the cells for her."

The cigar girl bowed her head in simulated fright, sped past the incoming tourists, and lost herself in the shifting crowd on the street. Aimer permitted himself to mutter angrily as he turned back to his books.

"You see, mother? See that hotel keeper lose his temper and tongue-lash that poor girl? Just what I tell you—these foreigners don't know how to be polite to ladies."

Henry J. Sherman—"yes, sir, of Kewanee, Illynoy"—mopped his bald pink dome and glared truculently at the insulting back of Joseph Almer. Mrs. Sherman, the lady of direct impulses who had contrived to stare Captain Woodhouse out of countenance in the Winter Garden not long back, cast herself despondently on the decrepit lounge and appeared to need little invitation to be precipitated into a