It was perhaps with the idea of relieving the tension of their
mood that Evelina, the following Sunday, suggested inviting Miss
Mellins to supper. The Bunner sisters were not in a position to be
lavish of the humblest hospitality, but two or three times in the
year they shared their evening meal with a friend; and Miss
Mellins, still flushed with the importance of her "turn," seemed
the most interesting guest they could invite.

As the three women seated themselves at the supper-table,
embellished by the unwonted addition of pound cake and sweet
pickles, the dress-maker's sharp swarthy person stood out vividly
between the neutral-tinted sisters. Miss Mellins was a small woman
with a glossy yellow face and a frizz of black hair bristling with
imitation tortoise-shell pins. Her sleeves had a fashionable cut,
and half a dozen metal bangles rattled on her wrists. Her voice
rattled like her bangles as she poured forth a stream of anecdote
and ejaculation; and her round black eyes jumped with acrobatic
velocity from one face to another. Miss Mellins was always having
or hearing of amazing adventures. She had surprised a burglar in
her room at midnight (though how he got there, what he robbed her
of, and by what means he escaped had never been quite clear to her
auditors); she had been warned by anonymous letters that her grocer
(a rejected suitor) was putting poison in her tea; she had a
customer who was shadowed by detectives, and another (a very
wealthy lady) who had been arrested in a department store for
kleptomania; she had been present at a spiritualist seance where an
old gentleman had died in a fit on seeing a materialization of his
mother-in-law; she had escaped from two fires in her night-gown,
and at the funeral of her first cousin the horses attached to the
hearse had run away and smashed the coffin, precipitating her