The Chinese Orange Mystery

“Slush,” she said defiantly, glaring at the door. There was no reply; at least, no reply of a satisfactory nature. There’s nothing, she thought with dismal consternation, you can say to a ghostly chuckle and the slam of a dusty book dug out of somebody’s grave. He was the most exasperating old-She almost said it. For a moment, in fact, it trembled upon the brink of utterance. But her better nature triumphed and she closed her pale lips sternly. Let him dress himself if he wanted to. She had always hated dressing old people, anyway . . . . She stood irresolute for a moment; and then, her color still high, clumped down the corridor with the firm unhurried steps of the professional nurse.

The twenty-second floor of the Hotel Chancellor was pervaded, by inflexible regulation, with the silent peace of the cloister. The quiet soothed Miss Diversey’s ruffled soul. There were two compensations, she thought, to playing nurse to a creaking, decrepit, malicious old devil afflicted¯thank heaven there was justice!¯with chronic rheumatism and gout. One was the handsome salary young Donald Kirk paid her for the difficult task of taking care of his father; the other was that the Kirk menage was situated in a respectable hotel in the heart of New York City. The money and the geography, she thought with morbid satisfaction, made up for a lot of disadvantages. Macy’s, Gimbel’s, the other department stores were only minutes away, movies and theatres and all sorts of exciting things at one’s doorstep . . . . Yes, she would stick it out. Life was hard, but it had its compensations.

Not that they weren’t a trying lot at times. Lord knows she had crawled to the whims of plenty of nasty people in her day. And that old Dr. Kirk was nasty; there was no pleasing him. You’d think a body would be pleasant and human and grateful sometimes; give a person a “please” here or a “thank you” there. But not old Beelzebub. A tyrant, if ever there was one. He had eyes that gave a person the shivers; and his white hair stood on end as if it were trying to get as far away from him as it possibly could. He wouldn’t eat when you wanted him to. He refused massages and threw shoes about. He would totter around the suite when Dr. Angini said he mustn’t walk and refuse to budge when Dr. Angini said he must exercise. About the only good thing about him was that when his purple old nose was buried in a book he was quiet.

And then there was Marcella. Marcella! Snippy little fluff she was; in fifty years she’d be the feminine counterpart of her father. Oh, she had her good points, reflected Miss Diversey grudgingly; but then so have criminals. Adding her up, good and bad, you wouldn’t have much. Of course, conceded Miss Diversey, who had a strong sense of justice, she couldn’t really be as worthless as all that; not with that nice tall pink-cheeked Mr. Macgowan so crazy about her. It certainly did take all kinds of people to make a world! Now, Miss Diversey was sure that if Mr. Macgowan had not happened to be Mr. Donald Kirk’s friend there never would have been an engagement between Mr. Macgowan and Mr. Kirk’s young sister. That’s what comes of having a brother and pots of money, thought Miss Diversey darkly. You go out and snare just about the best catch¯Miss Diversey read the society-gossip columns critically¯in the social whirl. Well, maybe when they were married he’d find out. They generally do, thought Miss Diversey, who possessed among other admirable qualities a decided strain of cynicism. The stories she could tell about these society people! . . . As for Donald Kirk, he was all right in his way; but his way was not Miss Diversey’s way. He was a snob. That is, he treated people like Miss Diversey with a certain good-humored, absent tolerance.