As I
told you, she was a mere shadow in the background of the
house I saw her in--and that was four or five years ago..."
"When she was with a Mrs. Murrett?"
"Yes; an appalling woman who runs a roaring dinner-factory
that used now and then to catch me in its wheels. I escaped
from them long ago; but in my time there used to be half a
dozen fagged 'hands' to tend the machine, and Miss Viner was
one of them. I'm glad she's out of it, poor girl!"
"Then you never really saw anything of her there?"
"I never had the chance. Mrs. Murrett discouraged any
competition on the part of her subordinates."
"Especially such pretty ones, I suppose?" Darrow made no
comment, and she continued: "And Mrs. Murrett's own opinion
--if she'd offered you one--probably wouldn't have been of
much value?"
"Only in so far as her disapproval would, on general
principles, have been a good mark for Miss Viner. But
surely," he went on after a pause, "you could have found out
about her from the people through whom you first heard of
her?"
Anna smiled. "Oh, we heard of her through Adelaide Painter
--;" and in reply to his glance of interrogation she
explained that the lady in question was a spinster of South
Braintree, Massachusetts, who, having come to Paris some
thirty years earlier, to nurse a brother through an illness,
had ever since protestingly and provisionally camped there
in a state of contemptuous protestation oddly manifested by
her never taking the slip-covers off her drawing-room
chairs.
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