Ladies’ Bane Read Online Free PDF

was, and that her eyes were not really dark, but grey with brown flecks in them.
    Well, you can’t just laugh in a man’s face and not tell him why, so she told him about Norris and Cousin Eleanor. And from there they seemed to get on to her American visit, she didn’t quite know how or why, and she told him about the monologues.
    “Of course you have just the right voice. I should think you could make it express anything you wanted it to. Are you going on with them over here?”
    “I’ve had some offers-but I told you Cousin Eleanor has been ill. And she’s not just an ordinary cousin, she brought us up.”
    “Us?”
    “I have a sister-Allegra. She is married to a man called Geoffrey Trent. I’m going to stay with them next week, and after that I shall have to make some plans. Cousin Eleanor is much better.”
    Jim Severn was frowning.
    “Now where did I come across that name?… Of course-how stupid!”
    He got up, went out of the room, and came back again with a crumpled piece of paper in his hand.
    “I was quite puzzled for the moment. But of course you must have dropped it last night. I picked it up on the stairs in the house we were in.” Ione took the paper and smoothed it out. It was a bit torn irregularly off the edge of a newspaper. It was rather dirty and very much creased. The words pencilled upon the blank margin were well on their way to being illegible. If they had not been familiar to Ione, she would probably have been unable to read them. As it was, she stared at them in surprise. There was a name, and the name was Geoffrey Trent. And there was an address.
    She stared at it. Faint as the words were, she could not mistake them:
    The Ladies’ House,
    Bleake.
    It was Geoffrey Trent’s address, but how in the world could Jim Severn have come by it? Her voice dragged a little as she said,
    “I’ve never seen it before.”

CHAPTER 5
    As Ione walked into Mr. Sanderson’s office she had the faintly regretful feeling that she was passing from adventure to the commonplace. At the time some of the adventure had been very unpleasant, but in retrospect it merely provided a thrill. It is always amusing to stand on the threshold of a new friendship and speculate as to its possibilities. Jim Severn quite obviously wanted to be friends. She had promised to lunch with him when she came back from her visit to Allegra. They had begun tentatively to explore one another’s minds. Rather like going into a house that you have never been in before and trying to find out what the owner is like, what sort of things are prized, and what rejected. Is it a warm, welcoming, livable house, or is it the narrow kind which is shut up with its own thoughts and has no friends? You look, you touch, you guess, you explore. There are some locked doors. Not so good if there are too many of them. As far as she had gone, Jim Severn’s house felt clean and airy. She hoped he thought the same of hers. Of course everyone had their cellars and their attics.
    These attractive speculations were at once dispelled by the atmosphere of Mr. Sanderson’s office. It was warm, and it was handsomely furnished, but there lingered upon it a suggestion of mould, and mice, and a rather pungent kind of furniture-polish. It was always the same, and so was Mr. Sanderson, tall and grey and formal in his City clothes and a collar that had been out of fashion for so long that it was just beginning to come back again. Since he had worn folding glasses with steel rims ever since he had first taken his place in the firm which was Sanderson, Sanderson, Hildred and Sanderson, he saw no reason why he should discard them for the up-to-date horn-rimmed variety. They hung always a little crooked upon a nose rather meagrely equipped to sustain them, and they were apt to fall off when he bent forward to examine anything at all closely. He peered through them at Ione now and said that it was always a pleasure to see her.
    “And your sister too of course-but I did