Mrs. Ames Read Online Free PDF Page B

you did not dine at your dentist’s, though his manipulations enabled you to dine with comfort and confident smiles elsewhere. Such lines as these she drew with precision, but automatic firmness, and the apparently strange case of Mr Turner, whom she had induced her husband to propose for election at the club, whom, with his wife, she herself asked to dinner, was really no exception. For it was not Mr Turner who had ever been a stationer in Riseborough, but his father, and he himself had been to a public school and a university, and had since then purged all taint of stationery away by twenty years’ impartiality as a police magistrate in London. True, he had not changed his name when he came back to live in Riseborough, which would have shown a greater delicacy of mind, and the present inscription above the stationer’s shop, ‘Burrows, late Turner’, was obnoxious, but Mrs Ames was all against the misfortunes of the fathers being visited on the children, and Riseborough, with the exception of Mrs Altham, had quite accepted Mr and Mrs Turner, who gave remarkably good dinners, which were quite equal to the finest efforts of the (Scotch) chef at the club. Mrs Altham said that the Turners had eaten their way into the heart of Riseborough society, which sounded almost witty, until Mrs Ames pointed out that it was Riseborough, not the Turners, who had done the eating. On which the wit in Mrs Altham’s mot went out like a candle in the wind. It may, perhaps, be open to question whether Mrs Altham’s rooted hostility to the Turners did not predispose Mrs Ames to accept them before their quiet amiability disposed her to do so, for she was neither disposed nor predisposed to like Mrs Altham.
    Mrs Ames’ way led through Queensgate Street, and she had to hold her black skirt rather high as she crossed theroad opposite the club, for the dust was thick. She felt it wiser also to screw her small face up into a tight knot in order to avoid inhaling the fetid blue smoke from an over-lubricated motorcar that very rudely dashed by just in front of her. She did not regard motors with any favour, since there were financial reasons, whose validity was unassailable, why she could not keep one; indeed, partly no doubt owing to her expressed disapproval of them, but chiefly owing to similar financial impediments, Riseborough generally considered that hired flies were a more gentlemanly and certainly more leisurely form of vehicular transport. Mrs Altham, as usual, raised a dissentient voice, and said that she and her husband could not make up their minds between a Daimler and a Rolls-Royce. This showed a very reasonable hesitancy, since at present they had no data whatever with regard to either.
    Mrs Ames permitted herself one momentary glance at the bow window of the club, as she regained the pavement after this dusty passage, and then swiftly looked straight in front of her again, since it was not quite QUITE to look in at the window of a man’s club. But she had seen several things: her husband was standing there with face contorted by the imminent approach of a sneeze, which showed that his hay fever was not yet over, as he hoped it might be. There was General Fortescue with a large cigar in his mouth, and a glass, probably of sherry, in his hand; there was also the top of a bald head peering over the geraniums in the window like a pink full moon. That no doubt was Mr Turner (for no one was quite so bald as he), enjoying the privilege which she had been instrumental in securing for him. Then Mrs Altham passed her driving, and Mrs Ames waved and kissed her black-gloved hand to her, thinking how very angular curiosity made people, while Mrs Altham wavedback thinking that it was no use trying to look important if you were only five foot two, so that honours were about divided. Finally, just before she turned into her own gate, she saw coming along the road, walking very fast, as his custom was, the man she