uesday. Or
maybe Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or Sattiday." The door began
to close.

He inserted a desperate foot.

"I wish to see Miss Simms--Miss Anne, or Nancy Simms. My information
is that she lives in this house. I should have stated my errand at
once, had I been allowed to do so." He looked at the girl
reprovingly.

Before she could reply, a female voice from a back region rose
stridently:

"Nancy! You Nancy! What in creation you mean, gassin' this hour o'
day when them biscuits is burnin' up in the oven? Send that feller
about his business, whatever it is, and you come tend to yours!"

The girl hesitated, and frowned.

"If you come to see Anne Simms, same as Nancy Simms, I'm her--I
mean, she's me," said she, hurriedly. "I got no time to talk with
you now, Mister, but you can wait in the parlor until I dish up
dinner, and whilst they're eatin' I'll have time to run up and see
what you want. Is it partic'ler?"

"Very."

"Come on in an' wait, then."

"Nancy! You want I should come up there after you? Oh, my stars, an'
that girl _knows_ how partic'ler Poppa is about his biscuits; they
gotta be jest so or he won't look at 'em, an' her gassin' and him
likely to raise the roof!" screamed the voice.

"Oh, shut up! I'm comin'," bawled the girl in reply. "You better sit
over there by the winder, Mister," she told her visitor, hastily.
"There's a breeze there, maybe. You'll find to-day's paper an' a fan
on the table." She vanished, and he could hear her running
kitchenward, and the shrieking voice subsiding into a whine.

Mr. Chadwick Champneys slumped limply into a chair. Everything he
looked at added to his sense of astonishment and unease.

The outside of the house hadn't lied: the inside matched it. Mr.
Champneys found himself staring and being stared at by the usual
crayon portraits of defunct members of the family,--at least he
hoped they were defunct,--the man with a long mule face and neck
whiskers; and opposite him his spouse, with her hair worn like
mustard-plasters on the skull. "Male and female created He them."
Placed so that you had to see it the moment you entered the
door, on a white-and-gold easel draped with a silkoline scarf
trimmed with pink crocheted wheels, was a virulently colored
landscape with a house of unknown architecture in the foreground,
and mother-of-pearl puddles outside the gate. Mr. Champneys
studied those mother-of-pearl puddles gravely. They hurt his
feelings. So d