Jill herself opened the door.
"Come in and have some coffee," her eyes passed from McTaggart to the big gray car. "Doesn't it look jolly! I'm longing to go in it, but I'm rather bothered too—I'll tell you why..."
She led the way through the hall into the dining-room, where the remains of a frugal lunch on a much-darned cloth were scattered around a dying fern in a tarnished brass pot, sole ornament of the long bare table.
The room had a forlorn look, with its dingy, crooked blinds, the mantel-piece littered with circulars above the feeble gas fire. It had the unhomelike air one associates with lodgings—a place to be used, not loved, and shunned when meals were over.
"Now don't say you can't come." McTaggart frowned severely—"because I mean to carry you off whether you like it or not. I've got the car for the day, and we'll go right into the country and have tea somewhere—at a little village pub!"
"Lovely!" Jill clapped her hands. She poured out a brimming cup of a thin and cloudy mixture from a chipped coffee-pot. "There you are!—Sugar? The only thing is I'd promised to go and see the baker's wife."
McTaggart laughed at her serious face.
"Oh, bother the baker's wife! Surely for one day you might relax your ... social efforts. Think of poor me."
The Man with the Double Heart
Muriel Hine • Papersense
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