His directness brought Lily Condor out of her languidness with a sharp turn.  She wriggled up and sat erectly on the edge of the davenport, one slippered foot dangling just above the other.  “Why, Ned Stillman, what an old fraud you are!  I didn’t fancy you were interested in anybody.  I didn’t think that you....  Oh, well, throw me a cigarette and let me hear the worst in comfort!”

He opened his cigarette-case and leaned over toward her.  She made her choice.  He struck a match and she put her hand tightly on his wrist as she bent over the flame and slowly drew in her breath.  Even after she had released her grasp his flesh still bore the imprint of the rings on her fingers.  For a moment he had an impulse to bow himself out of her presence without further explanation, but already she seemed to have a proprietary interest in him.  Her smile was full of friendly malice.

He ended by telling her everything, in spite of the conviction that he had approached the wrong person.

“Of course,” she hazarded, boldly, when he had finished, “you mean to help her out.”

Her presumption annoyed but rather refreshed him.  “I’d like to do something, but, hang it all, what can be done?”

“What can be done?  If that isn’t like a man!  Or I should say, a gentleman!...  Why don’t you plunge in boldly and damn the consequences?...  It’s just your sort that sends women into the arms of men like Flint.  You’re so busy keeping an eye on the proprieties that you miss all the danger signals.”

Her tone was extraordinarily familiar, and, to a man who rather prided himself upon his ability to keep people at arm’s-length, it was not precisely agreeable.  Yet he knew that it would be folly to give any hint of his irritation.

“Well,” he contrived to laugh back at her, “so far as I can see, Miss Robson’s problems are quite too simple.  After all, it’s largely a question of money....  I can’t go and throw gold in her lap as if she were some beggar on a street corner.”

“You mean, I suppose, that you are afraid to risk the outraged dignity of this ward of yours.  I think that’s a lovely name for her.  Don’t you?...  You’re acquiring such a benevolent old attitude.  The only thing to be done, I fancy, is to adopt some transparent ruse—­some sort of Daddy-Long-Leggish deception.”  She closed her eyes thoughtfully—­“Hiring her as my accompanist, for instance.”  She rose to dispense Scotch and soda.  Stillman sat in thoughtful silence, while Mrs. Condor talked to very trivial purpose.  She seemed suddenly to have grown tired of the subject of Claire Robson.  The arrival of the expected dressmaker broke in upon the rather one-sided tete-a-tete.

“You’ll have to go,” Lily Condor announced with an intimate air of dismissal to Stillman.  “It would never do to let a mere man in on the secrets of the sewing-room.”

At the door he hesitated awkwardly over his good-by.  “I was wondering,” he said, “whether you were serious about ... about hiring Miss Robson as your accompanist.  You know I think the plan has possibilities.”