Mary Ellen, beside her, was a pinpoint of silent bafflement in the great teeming station; the very lack of introductions bewildered her. Celia glanced at her, said casually between her teeth, “See if you can save me a seat, will you, and I’ll meet you on the train,” and turned back to Willis. “Are you still working for Temple Insurance?”
Willis nodded proudly. “I get my own territory on the first of the year—how about that? But you’re the one I have to hand it to. That was some act you pulled about being the old man’s—”
“Let go of me” said Celia with such cold ferocity that his fingers fell away from her wrist at once, “and please don’t bother me again.”
Speed of comprehension had never been Willis’s strongest asset, and now he gaped confusedly for seconds before his face began to fill darkly with color. “Oh? Pretty quick with the brush-off, aren’t you? Found yourself another rich uncle?”
Celia’s fingers clenched around the handle of the suitcase she picked up. “I don’t know what you misunderstood,” she said, speaking slowly and steadily, “but if you start circulating rumors about me I’ll find out, and I’ll see that Temple Insurance gets the letters you wrote me from Milwaukee, the ones explaining how much you were making on your expense account. I don’t think they’d like that, Willis. I think they might not give you a territory after all. I think you’d find it hard to get a job in any insurance company around here.”
She knew instinctively that to wait even momentarily for his reaction would be to diminish the impact of the threat. She walked instantly away at a controlled speed which suggested purpose but not flight, even though from the retained image of murderous rage on Willis’s face she half-expected a violent hand on her shoulder. When it did not come, the beginnings of confidence began to warm away a little of her body’s fierce tension.
She had no real way of assessing the strength of her weapon, but it stood to reason that strict honesty would be a fairly basic requirement in a claims investigator. It seemed equally plausible that even rival insurance companies would close ranks on such an issue. Besides, she had had no choice. A smile and a false address would have left Willis Lambert lingering underfoot like a land mine on any street corner or in any restaurant, far more dangerous than before. His face had flashed into a distillation of fury disturbing to remember, but surely a man ambitious enough to attend night school wouldn’t jeopardize his job to avenge a private humiliation? He had indeed mentioned padding his expense account in Milwaukee, but from a distance of all those months he might easily think the carefully preserved letters far more damaging than they actually were.
An explanation had to be found for Mary Ellen, who had miraculously saved a seat on the crowded train and made herself very unpopular by doing so. Celia transferred the protective heap of handbag and newspaper and packages, sank down, and said with an exasperated air, “Just because I went to a high-school dance with that creature once, he keeps bobbing up and pretending were old friends. I didn’t even dare introduce you for fear he’d start coming around to the apartment.”
“He certainly looked the persistent type, but at least you got rid of him,” said Mary Ellen cheerfully as the train started, and Celia, with an inner and recoiling wonder that Willis had ever seemed like a trophy to be won, replied, “Yes. For good, I think.”
But the encounter, or Willis’s jeer, had shaken her in an area where she had begun to feel secure, and in the moment of being introduced to the Vestrys’ housekeeper Celia had a brief terror that the older woman would show her a gleam of mocking recognition. “Don’t be put off by Mrs. Trask,” Mary Ellen had advised in the taxi. “She’s been with us since I was five and she never lets me forget it. She looks like a tartar but she really has a heart of gold. At least,” she added in one of her characteristic wanderings, “we’ve always assumed that she has a heart of gold; I don’t know whether it’s ever been put to the test. It would be ghastly, sort of, if she didn’t at all.”
But to the housekeeper, for all her shrewd little brown eyes, Celia was merely another guest. She began to fuss over Mary Ellen, and pure reaction gave Celia such a heightened awareness that she never quite forgot that instant in the paneled hall. A sharp fragrance from evergreens piled in a huge copper bowl, a murmur of voices from a room of which only a radiant comer was visible, showing the arm of a flowery slipcovered couch, shining dark curlicues at the edge of a mirror, reflected points of color from an unseen Christmas tree glowing on a pale wall: it was like an essence bottled especially for Celia Brett.
Only one other moment of the weekend was to attain that curious, threshold excitement.
The gravelly voice which Celia had attributed to a bad telephone connection was Mrs. Vestry’s very own. Even when she lowered it confidentially it had a deep and roughened quality, like the purr of a cat with a bad cold. She was a tall, angular woman with short, curly, biscuit-colored hair and bright blue eyes, and it never came as a surprise to people meeting her for the first time that she could still beat her husband, her son, and her two daughters
