Miss Roach looked at her. Was she, perhaps, a seductress? She might be, but for the life of her Miss Roach couldn’t see it. She saw nothing but an ordinary, rather badly dressed, foreign-looking woman in her late thirties, with rather nice blue eyes, and a pinched nose, and rather nice-coloured hair – the sort of woman who might, indeed, seduce some odd, elderly man who knew her (in rather the same way as Miss Roach had seduced the accountant in her firm), but whose immediate impact upon anyone, man or woman, seeing her in public or meeting her in private, would amount to zero. And now this femme fatale had appeared upon the scene, whose self-confessed deadly methods were slow but sure! The thought occurred to Miss Roach that she was, perhaps, a little sex-mad. Or had she been drinking before she came in here, and was she slightly drunk? She had arrived unaccountably (and unapologetically) late, and this might well be the explanation.

Whatever the answer, Miss Roach now had a definite feeling that this new Vicki Kugelmann was not quite the one she had bargained for, and that the friendship was not likely to develop on quite the lines she had hoped. In fact, she was not quite sure, if conversations of this sort were going to be the order of the day, that she would be absolutely happy in having Miss Kugelmann staying in the same boarding-house with her. This, in its turn, reminded her that she had promised to speak to Mrs. Payne about this very matter. She had failed to do so, and sooner or later she had to make some excuse for her failure. She decided that there was no time like the present, and that this would also serve to change the subject.

‘Oh – by the way,’ she said, ‘you know I was going to talk to Mrs. Payne – round at my place . . .’

‘Ah yes? Mrs. Payne?’ said Vicki, suddenly sitting up, and looking at Miss Roach with the utmost interest.

‘Well, I was going—’

‘No. Don’t go on. I have a surprise!’ Vicki put forth an admonishing finger with one hand, and finished off her drink with the other. ‘I have a surprise! . . . Now. What are you going to have? The same again?’

‘A surprise? . . . What?’ said Miss Roach. ‘Go on. Tell me.’

‘No,’ said Vicki gleefully, as she rose and collected the glasses. ‘First we have a drink and then I tell you. A great surprise, but first we have a drink. The same?’

Miss Roach said she would have the same, and Vicki went to the bar. Miss Roach wondered what was coming, and guessed that, as is so often the case on these occasions between friends, the person surprised was not going to take anything like the same amount of pleasure in the surprise as the surpriser.