A fool's mission? Perhaps, and yet I resolved to take it. I put some things into a bag and, telling Christopher that Jerry wasn't to expect me home that night, I caught an evening train to the city.
It was not difficult to reach her by telephone, for I found her at the house in Washington Square. She did not recall my voice or my name, and only when I said that I had been Jerry Benham's tutor, did she remember. It was a personal matter, I explained, having to do with Mr. Benham, and at that she consented to see me. I left the telephone booth at the hotel perspiring freely, aware for the first time of the awkwardness and delicacy of my undertaking. But I dined and changed into my blue serge suit, one that I had bought upon the occasion of my last visit to town, and at half past eight presented myself in the Habberton drawing-room. In the moments before she appeared, I sat ill at ease, my eyes taking in every detail of the well-ordered room, the cool gray walls, the family portraits, the old-fashioned ornaments upon table and mantel, aware, in spite of myself, that I was warm at the collar, impatient for the interview to begin, yet fearful for it.
I was watching the folding doors at the end of the room when she startled me by appearing silently almost at my elbow. The lights were dim, but I could see that her face wore no smile of greeting and as I rose she did not offer me her hand.
"Mr. Canby," she said politely, indicating a chair, "won't you sit down?"
"Er--thanks," I said. My throat was dry. I hoped she would not make it too difficult for me. Meanwhile I saw her eyeing me narrowly as though the possibility had just occurred to her that I might have come to ask for money. She waited a moment for me to speak, but I found it difficult to begin.
"Mr. Benham sent you to me?" she asked at last very coolly.
"Er--not exactly," I stammered. "Mr. Benham did not send me, but I--I'm here in his interest."
The rising inflection on the monosyllable could hardly have been called encouraging.
"The circumstance of our first meeting," I ventured again with an assumption of ease that I was far from feeling--"its duration was so brief that I feared you wouldn't remember me."
"You surely did not come here," she said icily, "merely to discuss the circumstances of our first meeting."