What Will People Say Author:Rupert Hughes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V THE women he passed glared hatpins at Forbes and groaned as they rose and hunched back to let him by. They clutched at the wraps he disarranged. He ... more »rumpled one elaborate hat stuck in the back of a seat, and one silk tile that had fallen out of the wire rack he kicked under the row ahead. He had an impulse to go after it; but when he realized the postures and scrambles it would involve, it was too horrible an ordeal. He pretended not to have noticed, and pressed onward. None was so indignant as the man who had similarly climbed out for a drink the entr'acte before. Forbes knew it was a drink he had gone out for the moment he passed him. Forbes was not going out for a drink, but for important information. He apologized meekly, yet continued on his course. By the time he was in the open Ten Eyck had disappeared. He was not in the lobby, nor among the men smoking on the sidewalk or dashing across the street to one of the cafes where coffee could not be obtained. Forbes found his man at last in the smoking-room below-stairs. He was puffing a cigarette, and met Forbes' eager glance with such blank indifference that Forbes' words of greeting stopped in his throat. To explain his presence in the smoking-room Forbes lighted a cigar, though he knew that he could have but a few puffs of it. And it was such a good cigar! There can only be so many good cigars in the world. The two men paced back and forth on crisscrossing paths as violently oblivious of each other as the twotraditional Englishmen who were cast away on the same desert island and had never been introduced. It was not till Murray Ten Eyck flung down his cigarette and made to leave that Forbes mustered courage enough to speak, in his Virginian voice: "Pardon me, suh, but aren't you Mr. Mu'y Ten Ey...« less