Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/218

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to make more like that one," he said, when she had gone briskly into the great, lighted doorway. "Who was she talkin' about? Her husband?"

"No; she ain't married. This Winge is only a dumb-bell lives here her and I joke about. He ain't got no chance with her at all."

"I hope not," the policeman said. "You'd hate to think of one like that marryin' a dumb-bell. About how old is she, you think?"

"Miss Ambler?" the doorman returned thoughtfully. "Well—prob'ly somewhere around where either they marry a young feller or else don't, and wait a while and marry a man that's lost his wife."

"Is she so?" his friend said, amused. "I expect from her looks, though, she don't feel no great call to be troublin' her head over that!"

But his surmise was not at all a correct one: Miss Ambler had been troubling her head about that a great deal of late. In fact, at this very moment, in the elevator of the Abercrombie, she was almost acutely troubling her head about it and she had some special promptings to painful thought upon the subject. The least pressing of them, it may be explained, as a key to her present state of mind, was the fact that