Caroline dissented. She said that if the man was a hairdresser, he would have

wavy hair—not straight. All hairdressers did.

 

I cited several hairdressers personally known to me who had straight hair, but

Caroline refused to be convinced.

 

“I can’t make him out at all,” she said in an aggrieved voice. “I borrowed some

garden tools the other day, and he was most polite, but I couldn’t get anything

out of him. I asked him point blank at last whether he was a Frenchman, and he

said he wasn’t—and somehow I didn’t like to ask him any more.”

 

I began to be more interested in our mysterious neighbor. A man who is capable

of shutting up Caroline and sending her, like the Queen of Sheba, empty away

must be something of a personality.

 

“I believe,” said Caroline, “that he’s got one of those new vacuum cleaners——”

 

I saw a meditated loan and the opportunity of further questioning gleaming from

her eye. I seized the chance to escape into the garden.

 

I am rather fond of gardening. I was busily exterminating dandelion roots when a

shout of warning sounded from close by and a heavy body whizzed by my ear and

fell at my feet with a repellant squelch. It was a vegetable marrow!

 

I looked up angrily. Over the wall, to my left, there appeared a face.