The Withdrawing Room Read Online Free PDF

this particular occasion.
    Mariposa was circling the room with a tray of Sarah’s hot, delicious, filling, and surprisingly economical cheese puffs. Sarah was pouring wine for Mrs. Sorpende out of a cut-glass decanter she’d been tempted to sell but was now glad she’d held on to. Though they were filled from gallon jugs of the cheapest drinkable sherry she could find, the decanters did seem to have a favorable psychological effect on the flavor.
    All of a sudden it occurred to her that the gathering was several degrees more amicable than usual. Nobody was fighting with anybody. No whiny voice was pontificating about some niggling point in which nobody else except possibly the encyclopedic Mr. Porter-Smith had the vaguest interest. Momentarily puzzled, Sarah stopped short with the decanter in mid-air and looked about. Mrs. Sorpende continued to hold out her glass with an air of sweet patience. Sarah recollected herself.
    “I’m sorry. It just this moment dawned on me that Mr. Quiffen isn’t here. He’s usually so punctual.”
    “Been hoping he’d get stuck in the subway again, myself,” grunted Professor Ormsby, taking several more cheese puffs and settling himself where he could ogle Mrs. Sorpende’s décolletage in comfort.
    Tonight, that elegant lady had enlivened her favorite black gown with a huge red silk poppy, and set a high-backed Spanish comb in her hair. Sarah thought not for the first time that Mrs. Sorpende would make a far more impressive landlady than she, and asked her to do the honors with the decanter.
    “Could I ask you to take my place for a moment? I want to run out to the kitchen and see how things are getting on.”
    Actually she was wondering if Mr. Quiffen might have sent a message that nobody had remembered to give her. As a rule, both members of her multi-talented staff were punctilious about such things. In fact, Charles liked nothing better than to make a stately entrance with a slip of paper on a silver tray as if he were carrying the good news from Ghent to Aix. Tonight, though, he might have got held up at the factory while Mariposa was preoccupied with the cheese puffs.
    No, she found Charles bustling up the cellar stairs, white-gloved and ready to roll. There had been no message.
    “Then we shan’t hold dinner for him,” said Sarah crossly. “Mr. Quiffen knows the house rules. He’d be the first to squawk if anybody else kept him waiting.”
    Mr. Quiffen did not call and he did not come. They ate without him and found the experience a most agreeable change. Only Sarah could not escape the little worry that was nagging at her. It was so very unlike Mr. Quiffen not to make any kind of fuss whatever.
    Perhaps she ought to call Anora Protheroe after dinner and see if Barnwell Augustus was out there. He might have got waylaid into hearing George’s bear story, which went on for hours and from which once a victim was trapped there could be no escape. Sarah’s nerves were still too raw from her own recent tragedies to tolerate any unexplained absence, even Mr. Quiffen’s, without some degree of apprehension.
    After dinner they went back to the library for coffee. Sarah used the Export China that had been brought back by one of her seafaring ancestors after a successful deal in nutmeg graters, chamber pots, and other products of an advanced Western technology. The cups had the double advantage of being so small that they saved a good deal on coffee and of giving Sarah an excuse to drop an occasional nugget of family history, thus contributing to the atmosphere her lodgers were paying for.
    Jeremy Kelling had already joined them twice for dinner. On those occasions the anecdotes had been a good deal more picturesque. Sarah wished Uncle Jem could be here tonight to help her out of her preoccupation. However, he’d gone to some kind of old Barflies’ Reunion at a suitably disreputable saloon for which the group had been forced to search far and wide, urban renewal having hygienized