Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."

"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?"

"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but--"

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too."

The apartment was on the top floor-a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath.

The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles.

The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock.

Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room.

Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway.

Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog.

A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits-one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon.

Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.

Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner.

When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"-either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle-after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names-reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white.

Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.

When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms.

She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here.

But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

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