Page:Herbert Jenkins - Patricia Brent Spinster.djvu/84

 inexpensive cigarettes with matches, on the Sabbath he used only fusees.

"I love the smell of fusees," Miss Sikkum would simper, regardless of the fact that a hundred times before she had taken Galvin House into her confidence on the subject. "I think they're so romantic."

Patricia wondered if Mr. Bolton's fusee were an offering to heaven or to Miss Sikkum.

On Sunday mornings Miss Wangle and Mrs. Mosscrop-Smythe went to divine service at Westminster Abbey, and Mr. Cordal went to sleep in the lounge.

Mrs. Barnes wandered aimlessly about, making anxious enquiry of everyone she encountered. If it were cloudy, did they think it would rain? If it rained, did they think it would clear up? If it were fine, did they think it would last? Mrs. Barnes was always going to do something that was contingent upon the weather. Every Sunday she was going for a walk in the Park, or to church; but her constitutional indecision of character intervened.

Mr. Archibald Sefton, who showed the qualities of a landscape gardener in the way in which he arranged his thin fair hair to disguise the desert of baldness beneath, was always vigorous on Sundays. He descended to the dining-room rubbing his hands in a manner suggestive of a Dickens Christmas. After breakfast he walked in the Park, "to give the girls a treat," as Mr. Bolton