She hoped the country house would be within sight of the sea, and that the family garage would run to a comfortable little town-car for her personal use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to pay calls or leave cards, or to concerts and matinees....

At about this stage her chateaux en Espagne began to rock upon their foundations; a seismic phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama Therese and Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they habitually consumed in the cafe when the evening rush was over, the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the dull hours till closing time.

Thus reminded that it was nine o’clock or thereabouts of a stuffy evening in a stodgy world where nothing ever happened that hadn’t wearily happened the day before and the day before that and so back to the beginning of Time, and wasn’t scheduled tediously to continue happening to-morrow and the day after and so on to the end of Eternity, Sofia sighed and shook herself and put away the vanity of dreams.

But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry as the night.

In the rear of the room Mama Therese and Papa Dupont wrangled sourly over their food; not with impassioned rancour but in the natural order of things—­as others might discuss the book of the moment or the play of the year or scandal or Charlie Chaplin or the thundering fiasco of Versailles—­these two discussed each other’s failings with utmost candour and freedom of expression:  handling their subjects without gloves; never hesitating to touch upon topics not commonly mentioned in civil intercourse or to use the apt, unprintable word; never dreaming of politely terming a damned old hoe a spade; tossing the ball of recrimination to and fro with masterly ease.

Their preoccupation with this pastime was so thoroughgoing that Mama Therese even failed to notice the passage of the postman on his last round of the day.  Ordinarily, for reasons best known to herself and which Sofia had never thought to question, Mama Therese preferred personally to receive all letters and contrived to be on hand at the postman’s customary hours of call.  But to-night she only realized that he had come and gone when, happening to glance toward the caisse, she saw Sofia shuffling the half-dozen envelopes which had been left with her.

Immediately Mama Therese pushed back the table and got up, wiping chin and moustache with her napkin as she rolled toward the desk.

But she was too late.  Already Sofia had sorted out and was staring in blank wonder at an envelope addressed to Mama Therese and bearing in its upper left-hand corner the imprint of its origin: 

Secretan & Sypher
Solicitors
Lincoln’s Inn
Fields London, W.C. 3.

As yet she was simply startled by the coincidence, her brain had not had time to absorb its full significance—­that Mama Therese should receive a communication from these distinctively named solicitors on the evening of the very day on which they advertised concerning a young woman named Sofia!—­when the letter was snatched out of her hand, a torrent of objurgation was loosed upon her devoted head, and she looked into the black scowl of the Frenchwoman.