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Updated: September 27, 2025
He'd take the substance out of her, make her transparent!" "I have it then! Orpen! It shall be Orpen! Then she will be hung on the line." "You talk as if I were the week's washing," said Miss Van Tuyn, recovering herself. "But I would rather be on the clothes-line than on the line at the Royal Academy. No, Dick, I shall wait." "What for, my girl?"
Miss Van Tuyn was at home. He went up in the lift and was shown into her sitting-room. He waited there for a few minutes. Then the door opened and she came in smiling. "How good of you to come so soon! I hardly expected you." "But why not?" he said, as he took her hand. She glanced at him inquiringly, he thought, then said: "Oh, I don't know! You're a busy man, and have lots of engagements.
Adela Sellingworth in the midst of such a society!" exclaimed the world's governess with unfeigned astonishment. "What could have induced her but to be sure, Beryl Van Tuyn is famous for her escapades, and for bringing the most unlikely people into them. I remember once in Paris she actually induced Madame Marretti to go to ha ah!" He pulled himself up short.
Comparatively young though he was he knew that a woman's "by the way" usually means anything rather than what it seems to mean namely, a sentence thrown out by chance because it has just happened to turn up in the mind. "A living bronze." Miss Van Tuyn was exceptionally fond of bronzes and collected them with enthusiasm. She knew of course the Museum at Naples.
She had just left him when she met Craven in the hall of the hotel. Garstin had not allowed either her or Arabian to look at what he had done. He had, Miss Van Tuyn thought, seemed unusually nervous and diffident about his work. She did not know how he had gone on, and was curious. But she was going to dine with him that night.
If she met fifty living bronzes and added them to her collection it was nothing to him. He compared his feeling when Braybrooke had suggested Seymour Portman as a husband for Lady Sellingworth with his lack of feeling about Miss Van Tuyn and her bronze, and he was almost startled. And yet Miss Van Tuyn was lovely and certainly did not want him to go quite away out of her ken.
He was so taken aback that he was guilty of a definite start, and the exclamation, "Miss Cronin!" in a voice that suggested alarm. "Oh, old Fanny with Mrs. Clem Hodson!" said Miss Van Tuyn. "She's a school friend of Fanny's from Philadelphia. Let us go to that table in the far corner. I'll just speak to them while you order tea." "But I thought Miss Cronin never went out."
But how to contrive such an encounter? While he was meditating about this he was again rung up by Miss Van Tuyn, who suggested that he should play golf with her at Beaconsfield on the following day, Saturday. "You can't pretend you are working overtime at the F.O. to-morrow," she said. Craven replied that the F.O. kept him very long even on Saturdays. "What's the matter?
"You mean Dick Garstin. I don't know him." "He's absolutely unscrupulous, but a genius. I believe genius always is unscrupulous. I am sure of it. It cannot be anything else." "That's a pity." "I don't know that it is." "But how does Dick Garstin show his unscrupulousness?" Miss Van Tuyn looked suddenly wary. "Oh in all sorts of ways. He uses people. He looks on people as mere material.
And Miss Van Tuyn astonishingly had not resented this plain speaking. Mrs. Ackroyde, of course, had tried to find out something about Nicolas Arabian, but Miss Van Tuyn had evaded the not really asked questions, and had treated the whole matter with an almost airy casualness which had belied all that was in her mind.
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