Mimi sank into the soft cushions and watched the shops and passersby along the boulevard, her mind only half given to Mrs. Crosby’s chatter. It wasn’t so difficult to get along with this spoiled old woman, she decided. She runs on and on and apparently doesn’t expect answers even to her direct questions. By the time they reached the hotel Mimi had become as used to the incessant chatter as she had to the steady hum of the motor.
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