Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/111

 during the first hasty rebuilding following the great fire; and what chiefly caught her eye this morning, as Billy escorted her, were lurid film posters, pawnshops and cutlery displays; the huge, sooty colossus of the city hall and county buildings did not, in her mind, elevate the street. She had a feeling of being lowered as she sought Rinderfeld's number; she had never thought of herself as client of those who had business to do about the divorce courts.

But there was nothing second-rate or deteriorating to self-respect in the air of Rinderfeld's office; quite the contrary; it was a Rolls-Royce—or at least an excellent pseudo-Rolls-Royce—sort of office, even in the waiting room where Marjorie now found herself. If he had ever luxuriated in the maroon ostentation of heavy mahogany for office furnishings, he had learned better and stepped higher to the repression of dull walnut of delicate Chippendale-like lines in chairs and in side table upon which reposed no ordinary five and ten-cent weeklies, but Country Life, Field (the English edition), the Spectator and the two volumes of Wells' "Outline of History." The girl who sat at a small, Chippendale walnut desk near a door so obviously private that it needed no label was no usual office attendant; she was pretty, but repressed, pale without a patch of rouge; she was almost nunlike in her black dress, high about the neck and, as Marjorie noticed when she arose, lower than usual in the skirt.

"You are?" she asked quietly and without any apparent personal curiosity.

"Miss Conway," Marjorie replied, using the name that Rinderfeld had assigned her for her communications with him.

"About ten minutes, I think," the girl said and re-