To say that Mrs. Crosby, with Mimi in her wake, swept through the lobby of the hotel, would in a measure be an inaccurate statement of that massive lady’s progress. Her movement from one spot to another was to the irreverent-minded and to those crass souls who either did not know or, knowing, were unintelligent enough not to be properly impressed by Mrs. Crosby’s notion of what constituted the grand manner, might be properly described as an astounding combination of waddling, rolling, wheezing, limping and shuffling. Sometimes she seemed like a huge wave of flesh rising and sinking, rising and sinking, until she subsided upon the shore of her objective. At other times Mimi thought of her as one of the puffing, noisy tugboats in the East River—that is, if one of these boats were painted a brilliant pink or blue. Mrs. Crosby was wholly unaware of the disrespectful allusions or comparisons her friends made behind her back. But even those who saw beneath the ludicrous exterior down to the simple soul beneath could not refrain from amusement at the spectacle she presented. Even her closest friends dared not hint that she was other than the impressive, jovial, lovable creature she fancied herself to be.
Luncheon ordered, of truffles and soup and sweets and “just a teeny-weeny little chop—no, garsong, you’d better bring me two chops, because I’m starved,” Mrs. Crosby began presenting for Mimi’s approval the things she had gathered through the modern Aladdin’s lamp represented by her husband’s chequebook. Statuettes and “genuine” laces, oils, and drawings, usually of tender scenes of lovers strolling through sylvan bowers or kissing each other awkwardly under impossible-looking trees, odds and ends of all sorts of trinkets designed by masters of inutility and banality, boxes and closets and trunks disgorged an endless display of loot. Ninety percent of the stuff is junk, Mimi concluded. Had she been asked by Mrs. Crosby to advise her before she had bought them, Mimi was certain she would have done everything in her power to have prevented their purchase. There was no need nor did Mrs. Crosby want criticism now, only exclamations of praise and appreciation of the beauty and value of the oddly assorted variety of things which littered every available object in the room by the time luncheon was ready. So Mimi murmured politely: “How sweet!” or “How very charming!” and tried as hard as she could to make her voice sound sincere.
Luncheon finished, Mimi began taking surreptitious peeps at her wrist watch as she waited for some lull in the Niagara of words which poured from the Crosby mouth. She thought she saw her chance when the telephone rang.
“Answer it, won’t you, Miss Daquin, for me? That’s a dear! These silly little French phones annoy me so—why don’t they show some initiative and put in telephones like we have in America?”
“There’s a man named Forrester calling,” Mimi told her when she had answered the telephone.
“Oh, Jimmy Forrester! Tell them to send him right up! No—no, dear, you can’t run away now. Jimmy is the cutest and sweetest boy—even though he does laugh at me and some of my ways. He swears he doesn’t but some of the things he says sometimes sound suspiciously like he’s chaffing—that’s a nice word, isn’t it? I picked it up in London last week— … Oh, dear! you really must go? I do wish you’d take the afternoon off and come along to help me buy a few little things I need …”
But Mimi already had put her hat on and was halfway to the door, with elaborate indefiniteness promising to look in on Mrs. Crosby again “the very first time I can steal a minute or two.” Privately she was vowing to have no minutes free for her rotund hostess as long as she was in Paris. These promises and Mrs. Crosby’s reiteration of her demands that Mimi spend all her spare time with her took a longer time than Mimi knew. She wanted to get away but her hostess had launched into a life history of Jimmy Forrester and resignedly Mimi listened.
“… He comes of a very good family in New York—they haven’t much money but they’ve got position—Jimmie’s connected with a big brokerage house in New York that handles a lot of Mr. Crosby’s business—Jimmie does practically all of Horace’s buying and selling of stocks or bonds—frightfully smart, Jimmy is, and bright as a steel trap—Jimmie’s just like he’s my own son. …”
“Hello, Jimmie dear—I want you to meet a friend of mine who’s been trying her hardest to slip away before you came. Miss Daquin, this is Jimmie Forrester. You two ought to know each other real well”; and Mrs. Crosby beamed with maternal benedictions upon them.
Jimmie Forrester—James H. Forrester was the name engraved on his stationery—bowed and scanned Mimi from head to foot as he bowed. He was tall and slender, brown hair greying at his temples, his face lean and tanned. His face in repose, was indistinguishable from thousands of carefully groomed and tolerably handsome young men to be seen any afternoon on Fifth Avenue or in the fashionable streets near Piccadilly.
But when he smiled Jimmie Forrester became an individual. He had a trick of opening wide his eyes, and Mimi saw that they did not match. One of them was brownish while the other veered more towards hazel, giving him an exotic air which interested her mildly. And his smile revealed oddly crooked teeth, disarranged in a way that brought distinction to an otherwise uninteresting and commonplace mouth, a distinction, she decided, which modern dentistry would have destroyed had the teeth been straightened. All this she noticed in the hasty glance she gave him as they uttered the usual set phrases
