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"But what miracle?" he asked. "You have pulled Adela Sellingworth out of the shell in which she has been living curled up for over ten years." "Yes. You are a prodigy!" said Lady Wrackley, showing her teeth. "But I'm afraid I can't claim that triumph. I'm afraid it's due to Mr. Braybrooke's diplomacy." "Oh, no!" Mrs. Ackroyde said calmly. "Adela would never yield to his cotton-glove persuasions.
Dindie Ackroyde called him "Something Arabian." Lady Sellingworth's mind supplied the other name. It was Nicolas. Beryl had described him as "a living bronze." She had gone out to tea with him in a flat on the day her father's sudden death had been announced in the papers. And yet she had pretended that she was hovering on the verge of love for Alick Craven.
To her he seemed almost like a vital human being in the midst of a crowd of dummies endowed by some magic with the power of speech. She only felt him at this moment, though she was conscious of the baron, Mrs. Ackroyde, Bobbie Syng, the duchess, and others who were near her. This silent boy he was still a boy in comparison with her crumbling his bread, wiped them all out.
And at once she had a sensation of being out in the cold. They went down together in the lift. Just as they left it, and were in the hall, a woman whom Miss Van Tuyn knew slightly, a Mrs. Birchington, an intimate of the Ackroyde and Lady Wrackley set, met them coming from the entrance. "Oh, Miss Van Tuyn!" she said, stopping. She held out her hand, looking from Miss Van Tuyn to Arabian.
Glancing about her while she still spoke to Dindie Ackroyde carelessly, Lady Sellingworth saw young Leving; Sir Robert Syng; the Duchess of Wellingborough, shaking her broad shoulders and tossing up her big chin as she laughed at some joke; Jennie Farringdon, with her puffy pale cheeks and parrot-like nose, talking to old Hubert Mostine, the man of innumerable weddings, funerals and charity fetes, with his blinking eyelids and moustaches that drooped over a large and gossiping mouth; Magdalen Dearing, whose Mona Lisa smile had attracted three generations of men, and who had managed to look sad and be riotous for at least four decades; Frances Braybrooke, pulling at his beard; Mrs.
Ackroyde, who was blessed with a sometimes painfully retentive memory. "I suppose it's Zotos," observed Lady Wrackley. "Who's Zotos?" inquired young Leving of the turned-up nose and the larky expression. "A Greek who's a genius and who lives in South Moulton Street." "What's he do?" "Things that men shouldn't be allowed to know anything about. Talk to Bobbie for a minute, will you?"
Short, very handsome, always in perfect health, with brows and eyes which somehow suggested a wild creature, she had an honest and quite unaffected face. Her manner was bold and direct. There was something lasting some said everlasting in her atmosphere. "I cannot conceive of London without Dindie Ackroyde," said Braybrooke, as Mrs.
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