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 …”