Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/34

 Together they turned toward the others.

"I am afraid there was no one to answer the bell. We had all come out here, even the servants. We have just made a remarkable discovery. While digging a new cesspool, the workmen unearthed a statue. We have been unable to identify it. It seems to me a very strange statue."

In the back of his mind Winnery kept thinking, "I loathe this woman because she is refined and because she is so healthy and therefore so entirely out of place here." Because he had a liver, healthy people full of vitality had long been abhorrent to him, like people who whistle and sing in their morning tubs.

He was then introduced, first to a tall, handsome but rather battered woman of fifty, dressed smartly and much too youthfully in clothes which by their simplicity and cut bore the mark of the most expensive of Paris dressmakers. The woman had for him a faint air of familiarity. It was a face he had seen somewhere, the face of a woman of fifty which has been much worked over. She wore a great many bracelets and a string of real pearls.

"Principessa d'Orobelli," murmured Mrs. Weatherby, with a quiver of satisfaction. And then Mr. Winnery knew. She was one of those brilliant birds of passage whose photographs taken at the Lido surrounded by naked young men, whose names were of no importance, appeared from time to time in the illustrated weeklies. Although he had never seen her before, he had written many paragraphs for the Ladies' Own World concerning her movements