He did not appear to be grateful for the interruption, but Mrs. Jasher was not at all dismayed, being a man-hunter by profession.
Besides, she saw that Braddock was in the clouds as usual, and would have received the King himself in the same absent-minded manner.
“Pouf! what an abominal smell!” exclaimed the widow, holding a flimsy lace handkerchief to her nose. “Kind of camphor-sandal-wood charnel-house smell.
I wonder you are not asphyxiated.
Pouf!
Ugh!
Bur-r-r
The Professor stared at her with cold, fishy eyes.
“Did you speak?”
“Oh, dear me, yes, and you don’t even ask me to take a chair.
If I were a nasty stuffy mummy, now, you would be embracing me by, this time.
Don’t you know that I have come to dinner, you silly man?” and she tapped him playfully with her closed fan.
“I have had dinner,” said Braddock, egotistic as usual.
“No, you have not.” Mrs. Jasher spoke positively, and pointed to a small tray of untouched food on the side table. “You have not even had luncheon.
You must live on air, like a chameleon—or on love, perhaps,” she ended in a significantly tender tone.
But she might as well have spoken to the granite image of Horus in the corner.
Braddock merely rubbed his chin and stared harder than ever at the glittering visitor.
“Dear me!” he said innocently. “I must have forgotten to eat.
Lamplight!” he looked round vaguely. “Of course, I remember lighting the lamps.
Time has gone by very rapidly.
I am really hungry.” He paused to make sure, then repeated his remark in a more positive manner. “Yes, I am very hungry, Mrs. Jasher.” He looked at her as though she had just entered. “Of course, Mrs. Jasher.
Do you wish to see me about anything particular?”
The widow frowned at his inattention, and then laughed.
It was impossible to be angry with this dreamer.
“I have come to dinner, Professor. Do try and wake up; you are half asleep and half starved, too, I expect.”
“I certainly feel unaccountably hungry,” admitted Braddock cautiously.
“Unaccountably, when you have eaten nothing since breakfast.
You weird man, I believe you are a mummy yourself.”
But the Professor had again returned to examine the scarabeus, this time with a powerful magnifying glass.
“It certainly belongs to the twentieth dynasty,” he murmured, wrinkling his brows.
Mrs. Jasher stamped and flirted her fan pettishly.
The creature’s soul, she decided, was certainly not in his body, and until it came back he would continue to ignore her.
With the annoyance of a woman who is not getting her own way, she leaned back in Braddock’s one comfortable chair—which she had unerringly selected—and examined him intently.
Perhaps the gossips were correct, and she was trying to imagine what kind of a husband he would make.
But whatever might be her thoughts, she eyed Braddock as earnestly as Braddock eyed the scarabeus.
Outwardly the Professor did not appear like the savant he was reported to be.
He was small of stature, plump of body, rosy as a little Cupid, and extraordinarily youthful, considering his fifty-odd years of scientific wear and tear.
With a smooth, clean-shaven face, plentiful white hair like spun silk, and neat feet and hands, he did not look his age.
The dreamy look in his small blue eyes was rather belied by the hardness of his thin-lipped mouth, and by the pugnacious push of his jaw.
The eyes and the dome-like forehead hinted that brain without much originality; but the lower part of this contradictory countenance might have belonged to a prize-fighter.
Nevertheless, Braddock’s plumpness did away to a considerable extent with his aggressive look.
It was certainly latent, but only came to the surface when he fought with a brother savant over some tomb-dweller from Thebes.
In the soft lamplight he looked like a fighting cherub, and it was a pity—in the interests of art—that the hairless pink and white face did not surmount a pair of wings rather than a rusty and ill-fitting dress suit.
“He’s nane sa dafty as he looks,” thought Mrs. Jasher, who was Scotch, although she claimed to be cosmopolitan. “With his mummies he is all right, but outside those he might be difficult to manage.
And these things,” she glanced round the shadowy room, crowded with the dead and their earthly belongings. “I don’t think I would care to marry the British Museum.
Too much like hard work, and I am not so young as I was.”
The near mirror—a polished silver one, which had belonged, ages ago, to some coquette of Memphis—denied this uncomplimentary thought, for Mrs. Jasher did not look a day over thirty, although her birth certificate set her down as forty-five.
In the lamplight she might have passed for even younger, so carefully had she preserved what remained to her of youth. She assuredly was somewhat stout, and never had been so tall as she desired to be.
But the lines of her plump figure were still discernible in the cunningly cut gown, and she carried her little self with such mighty dignity that people overlooked the mortifying height of a trifle over five feet.
Her features were small and neat, but her large blue eyes were so noticeable and melting that those on whom she turned them ignored the lack of boldness in chin and nose.