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 looked as if she suffered from indigestion. And the sight of her dampered the last impatience of Barney’s expectation. Like a boy who has come to see melodrama and finds himself fobbed off with expository dialogue, he settled down on himself to wait for the action to begin.

Babbing had said to him: “You’ll have to look half-witted—simple—dotty. Understand?” No difficulty about that. Barney knew her sort. He had listened to one like her talking to his mother, once, till his legs went to sleep. She was a bore.

She acknowledged Bathing’s greeting as inhospitably as a hired housekeeper, and he explained that he was Adam Cook, from Chicago, now living at the Hotel Haarlem, but looking for rooms for himself and his young son, in some respectable house in which he could leave the boy safely while he was away at his office. "I have a letter of introduction to you, m’am,” he said; and he laid down his hat, got out his glasses, put them on, took them