home she can stay a couple of days till she looks around permanent. I and the Colonel are taking the 4.00 P.M. plane out West on business, ma’am. What the Colonel said was, I was to ast you, ma’am, could you keep her for us till we get back?”
Beads of perspiration popped out on Sergeant Buck’s forehead and the tarnish went deeper brass, as he waited for my answer. The only thing that delayed it was the “respectable.” That Sergeant Buck thought my home was respectable, and to the extent of commiting the child of a high-class personal friend of his to it, was overwhelming.
“Why, of course, Sergeant,” I said. Nobody can say I’m not gracious to a sweating foe. “I’d love to have her. When’s she coming?”
The breath of relief he took must have strained even his iron ribcage. “Friday, it says here, ma’am.” He took a dog-eared letter out of his teal-blue pocket. “Virginia Dolan’s her name. Her daddy was with us in France.”
That startled me. It was the other war when Colonel Primrose and his Sergeant were in France. I’d figured the child was ten or twelve, and I’d been wondering who I’d get to climb the Monument with her if I took the day at the Zoo and maybe the Congressional Library. “How old is she, Sergeant Buck?”
“Eighteen, going on nineteen, ma’am.”
“Oh, well,” I said, the Zoo and Monument both happily dissolving in my mind. “She’s old enough to look after herself, then.”
That was a mistake.
“She’s a very high-class little lady, ma’am.” You could see he already regretted letting his Colonel high-pressure him into putting this tender shoot into my callous hands. “Her daddy says she ain’t never been out of Taber City more than once or twice. They’re very high-class people, ma’am.”
“We’ll do our best, Sergeant,” I said. “You tell Lilac. I’m sure everything’ll be all right.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He started to back out of the room, and stopped. I’d picked up my coffee cup again, but I didn’t get it more than half-way to my lips, because something very odd indeed seemed to have happened to that battered, congealed stonework he’s facially equipped with. He was looking at my table, his dead pan sort of going to pieces in the oddest possible fashion. “—It just don’t look right, ma’am,” he said suddenly.
I glanced quickly down the polished bare expanse. It looked all right to me. I’d just paid some fabulous amount to get it refinished. “What doesn’t, Sergeant Buck?”
“You sittin’ by yourself at this bare old table, and the Colonel down the street sittin’ by himself at his bare old table.”
I expect I set my coffee cup down. It was on the bare old mahogany, six inches from the saucer, when I noticed it. I was so staggered I wouldn’t have known if I’d put it on the floor. But no more staggered than Sergeant Buck, I think. He came to a sort of semi-attention, his cast-iron jaw the color it must have been when they first took it out of the furnace.
“No offense meant, ma’am,” he said hastily.
“And none taken, Sergeant,” is what I should have answered, and what I’ve always answered, ever since that exchange became the password of our mutual forbearance. But this time I couldn’t say anything at all.
He cleared his throat again. “But if you’d let the Colonel be, till he gets back, ma’am. . . . He’s mighty busy. He ain’t got himself packed yet. You’d do him a personal favor if he calls up to come over, if you’d say no dice, ma’am.”
As both he and I knew well that Colonel Primrose has never packed himself since he left West Point, I saw he’d already regretted his momentary dissolving. But I nodded. I was still too touched, even then, to be articulate. And when Lilac, my cook for twenty years, waddled her two hundred pounds of sometimes sulphur and sometimes molasses, I never know which, up the stairs, I was still half-dazed.
“What you done to Mister Buck?” she demanded, her black moon face hovering between perplexity and righteous indignation. “What you say got him all outside himself?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell her it was what Sergeant Buck had said, not me. Never could I have foreseen him as a concrete-mixer-like Salome handing me on a silver charger the head of his St. John Primrose. “Nothing,” I said.
“You goin’ to take that girl in here for Mister Buck?” she inquired dubiously.
“We’re going to take her.” I was clear-headed enough to underline our joint responsibility. “It’ll only be for a few days.”
“Hm” she said. “Govamen’ Girl, Troublemen’ Girl. . . .”
That startled me too. I hadn’t got the idea the high-class little lady was in Washington for a job. Not that it would have mattered, however, and not that I’d have heard Sergeant Buck really if he’d told me in so many words. He did tell me where it was she’d never been away from more than once or twice, and I wasn’t bright enough to catch that.
I’d just left the bare board that had moved Sergeant Buck so incredibly when Colonel Primrose did call up, quite innocent of the recent disposal operation and merely wanting to drop in for a few minutes before their plane left.
“No,” I said, keeping faith with Sergeant Buck. “I’m doing you a personal favor. No dice. You’ve got to pack.”
He laughed, not too amused, I thought. “I’m sorry we’re saddling you with this girl of Buck’s,” he said.
“It’s a pleasure. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for Mister Buck.”
“Mister Buck’s a damn fool,” he said. “Clucking around like an old hen with a yellow chick to hide. He’s been combing the town for the last three days.”
Of course, I should have known, when Buck came, that a favor from me was an avenue when all other avenues were closed. But I was still too touched to remember that leopards don’t really change their spots, and delighted for him to hide his yellow chick in my respectable precincts. In a burst of predawn goodwill I even decided to take her to a garden party I was going to on Friday. Depending, of course . . . I’d seen only one other female friend of the Sergeant’s and she was fully feathered and the moulting season well advanced. But I suppose it was fate, really, and nothing else, stacking the cards against the Rufus Brents, that decided that. I can only think now how different things would have been if Sergeant Buck’s little lady had walked into that garden party with me. It seems incredible that Miss Virginia Dolan’s train being held up two hours by a flash flood in West Virginia could have made such a fantastic difference in the lives of the famous industrialist and his wife, who’d never seen or heard of Miss Virginia Dolan, and in the life of little Molly Brent, which in the long run was by far the most important.
It was Thursday, the day before the garden party and the little lady’s arrival, that I met Mrs. Rufus Brent the second time. I was having some people in to lunch, so I left the Red Cross early to get home and make the cocktails. Lilac belongs to the “Whoso Never Will” Society, and touching liquor is one of the things they chiefly won’t. Even her friend Mister Buck has to get the bourbon bottle out of the cupboard downstairs for himself. When I saw her moon face peer up out of the area window at me, obviously disconcerted about something, I hurried, thinking I was late, until I got along the hall to the living room that opens on the walled garden and saw the woman I’d seen at the beauty
