Old Sinners Never Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

in fact.
    “I wonder if we both couldn’t do with a drink? May I bring you something, Madam Secretary?”
    “You’re very kind. I would like a sherry.” She smiled on him with the sudden joy of one reprieved.
    His humour was restored, along with his confidence in himself as a judge of women. He found his best prospect of the evening so far to be the company of his own thoughts, a vigilant contemplation of the relationship between a young sport and a fifty-year-old spinster.
    On the way to the bar he purposely brushed against the man. It forced them to introduce themselves. Looking into his eyes, the expression in which seemed deliberately covert, like a lascivious cleric’s, and further judging him by the deliberate droop of his shape, the languid pose, the General would now call him a young decadent. He hadn’t seen anything quite like him since European society just before World War I, and perhaps the American imitation of it after that war. He gave his name as Leo Montaigne. The General wondered out of what novel he had taken it.
    “Sorry to have cut in on your conversation with Secretary Jennings,” the General said. “Didn’t mean to, you know. Just wanted to meet the lady.”
    “And understandable that you should.” Montaigne raised his voice a little. The woman in question was approaching. “All men seem to, and she is lovable, don’t you agree, sir?”
    “Adorable,” the General replied, and it could have been as handily said of a Sherman tank. The insolent pup, to have so involved him. He bulled his neck and charged on toward the bar.
    Chatterton once more intercepted him. “Oh, come, Ransom, surely it’s not that bad?”
    “If rotten is bad, it’s that bad,” the General said. “Where the hell did you get him? I’m surprised at Laura. And I’ll tell her so, myself.”
    Chatterton straightened himself up, and it seemed to give him pain to do it. “Is it any of your business, Ransom?”
    “No, I suppose it’s not.” He got hold of himself. “I’m being ridiculous, eh?”
    “Let me say this, he has many friends for whom he does many favours.”
    This time the General truly did not understand and said so.
    “Neither do I, Ransom, but I have a feeling he would make a deadly enemy.”
    In that the General concurred. “All right, old man. I promise—no fuss.”
    Chatterton was again completely affable. “Here’s Dr. d’Inde, one of the great art curators. You know him, don’t you?”
    The General stared for an instant at the tall, good looking man then bending low over the hand of his hostess. “No. Don’t know him.”
    “Come along and I’ll introduce you, a splendid fellow. He’ll be more to your liking. I understand he’s fathered seven children.”
    “I’d rather meet the mother,” the General growled.
    He started to follow his host, but at that moment another feminine guest was announced, and this one, by the heavens, was really feminine. Every man in the room added an inch to his stature the instant she came into view. The General forgot the introduction to d’Inde, the drink he had promised Madam Secretary and himself; he even forgot his ill humour and considered it a good omen that he was mobile and able, thus, to arrive at the side of the latest guest before any other man could disengage himself.
    “How do you do?” the General said.
    “Oh, I know you ,” she said in a voice that had a pleasant sort of rattle to it. Flat and somewhat nasal, it had nonetheless a warm, gay quality.
    “That, then, is but one of the many advantages you have over me,” he said, and bent low over her spangled fingertips.
    She gave his hand a little squeeze in delightful contrast to the pumpings he’d been having by the hands of women lately. “I’m Virginia Allan,” she said. “It’s an assumed name, of course. I mean I assumed it myself—honourably.” Her smile was sudden, and the twinkle went on in her blue eyes at the same time.
    “I’m sure nothing you do could be less