It took intellect even to select these things.

The other books, Miss Kimpsey noticed by the numbers labelled on their backs, were mostly from the circulating library--"David Grieve," "Cometh up as a Flower," "The Earthly Paradise," Ruskin's "Stones of Venice," Marie Corelli's "Romance of Two Worlds." The mantelpiece was arranged in geometrical disorder, but it had a gilt clock under a glass shade precisely in the middle.

When the gilt clock indicated, in a mincing way, that Miss Kimpsey had been kept waiting fifteen minutes, Mrs.Bell came in.

She had fastened her last button and assumed the expression appropriate to Miss Kimpsey at the foot of the stair.

She was a tall, thin woman, with no color and rather narrow brown eyes much wrinkled round about, and a forehead that loomed at you, and grayish hair twisted high into a knot behind--a knot from which a wispy end almost invariably escaped.