“Nice corals. Nice scarabs—real old.” That winning smile was beginning to look like a snarl.
Elinor had seen the drapery shop she was looking for; they crossed the street and entered.
“Saved!” she said. “He daren’t follow. I had such a horrible fear that he might suddenly begin to bite. Poor wretch, though! I think we ought to buy something.” She turned and addressed herself to the assistant behind the counter.
“Meanwhile,” said Philip, foreseeing that Elinor’s shopping would be interminably tedious, “I’ll go and get a few cigarettes.”
He stepped out into the glare. The man in the tarboosh was waiting. He pounced, he caught Philip by the sleeve. Desperately, he played his last trump.
“Nice postcards,” he whispered confidentially, and produced an envelope from his breast pocket. “Hot stuff. Only ten shillings.”
Philip stared uncomprehending. “No English,” he said and limped away along the street. The man in the tarboosh hurried at his side.
“Très curieuses,” he said. “Très amusantes. Mœurs arabes. Pour passer le temps à bord. Soixante francs seulement.” He saw no answering light of comprehension. “Molto artistiche,” he suggested in Italian. “Proprio curiose. Cinquanta franchi.” He peered in desperation into Philip’s face; it was a blank. “Hübsch,” he went on, “Sehr geschlechtlich. Zehn Mark.” Not a muscle moved. “Muy hermosas, muy agraciadas, mucho indecorosas.” He tried again. “Skon bref kort. Liderlig fotografi bild. Nakna jungfrun. Verklig smutsig.” Philip was evidently no Scandinavian. Was he a Slav? “Sprosny obraz,” the man wheedled. It was no good. Perhaps Portuguese would do it. “Photographia deshonesta,” he began. Philip burst out laughing. “Here,” he said, and gave him half a crown. “You deserve it.”
“Did you discover what you wanted?” asked Elinor when he returned.
He nodded. “And I also discovered the only possible basis for the League of Nations. The one common interest. Our toothy friend offered me indecent postcards in seventeen languages. He’s wasting himself at Port Said. He ought to be at Geneva.”
“Two ladies to see you, sir,” said the office boy.
“Two?” Burlap raised his dark eyebrows. “Two?” The office boy insisted. “Well, show them up.” The boy retired. Burlap was annoyed. He was expecting Romola Saville, the Romola Saville who had written,
Already old in passion, I have known
All the world’s lovers since the world began;
Have held in Leda’s arms the immortal Swan;
And felt fair Paris take me as his own.
And she was coming with a duenna. It wasn’t like her. Two ladies.
The two doors of his sanctum opened simultaneously. Ethel Cobbett appeared at one holding a bunch of galley proofs. By the other entered the two ladies. Standing on the threshold, Ethel looked at them. One of them was tall and remarkably thin. Almost equally tall, the other was portly. Neither of them was any longer young. The thin lady seemed a withered and virgin forty-three or four. The portly one was perhaps a little older, but had preserved a full-blown and widowed freshness. The thin one was sallow, with sharp bony features, nondescript brown hair and grey eyes, and was dressed rather fashionably, not in the style of Paris, but in the more youthful and jaunty mode of Hollywood, in pale grey and pink. The other lady was very blonde, with blue eyes and long dangling earrings and lapis lazuli beads to match. Her style of dressing was more matronly and European than the other’s and numbers of not very precious ornaments were suspended here and there all over her person and tinkled a little as she walked.
The two ladies advanced across the room. Burlap pretended to be so deeply immersed in composition that he had not heard the opening of the door. It was only when the ladies had come to within a few feet of his table that he looked up from the paper on which he had been furiously scribbling—with what a start of amazement, what an expression of apologetic embarrassment! He sprang to his feet.
“I’m so sorry. Forgive … I hadn’t noticed. One gets so deeply absorbed.” The n’s and m’s had turned to d’s and b’s. He had a cold. “So idvolved id ode’s work.”
He came round the table to meet them, smiling his subtlest and most spiritual Sodoma smile. But, “Oh God!” he was inwardly exclaiming. “What appalling females!”
“And which,” he went on aloud, smiling from one to the other, “which, may I venture to ask, is Miss Saville?”
“Neither of us,” said the portly lady in a rather deep voice, but playfully and with a smile.
“Or both, if you like,” said the other. Her voice was high and metallic and she spoke sharply, in little spurts, and with an extraordinary and vertiginous rapidity. “Both and neither.”
And the two ladies burst into simultaneous laughter. Burlap looked and listened with a sinking heart. What had he let himself in for? They were formidable. He blew his nose; he coughed. They were making his cold worse.
“The fact is,” said the portly lady, cocking her head rather archly on one side and affecting the slightest lisp, “the fact ith …”
But the thin one interrupted her. “The fact is,” she said, pouring out her words so fast that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to articulate them at all, “that we’re a partnership, a combination, almost a conspiracy.” She uttered her sharp shrill laugh.
“Yeth, a conthpirathy,” said the portly one, lisping from sheer playfulness.
“We’re the two parts of Romola Saville’s dual personality.”
“I being the Dr. Jekyll,” put in the portly one, and both laughed yet once more.
“A conspiracy,” thought Burlap with a growing sense of horror. “I should think it was!”
“Dr. Jekyll, alias Ruth Goffer. May I introduce you to Mrs. Goffer?”
“While I do the same for Mr. Hyde, alias Miss Hignett?”
“While together we introduce ourselves
