So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though
outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the dice to
come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet had organized
--he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with superstitious awe. And
tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and everyone went up to dress
for dinner.
XXIX
Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street--she heads letters from
it playfully "The Hen Coop" for there is almost always some member of her
own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite
celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York
with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for
visits and clothes--Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the
lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile
of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the
friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so
charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the
asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-
room wall, the bookcase with real books--a countable number of them--and
on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs.
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