The Nymph and the Lamp by Thomas H Raddall

my room,” Miss Jardine began in a low voice.
    â€œOh, come, Miss Jardine, that’s so old a tale!”
    â€œBut it’s true! I’d just had a bath, and I was brushing my hair.”
    Mrs. Paradee tossed her head and uttered a theatrical “Ha!” She had in her fashion a sense of humor. She had found more evil than good in her passage through a flinty world but it had given her a certain amount of cynical amusement along the way. The keeping of a lodginghouse in a seaport city had taught her all she cared to know about men and women, and what she had learned had filled her with contempt. She looked upon her lodgers as a species of animal, not to be loved or hated but simply to be preyed upon in the legitimate way of her trade. Her scorn for mankind was eased by the knowledge that they made tractable lodgers; but for women, by nature messy and deceitful creatures born to trouble, her contempt was supreme.
    She had long known that the wharfinger drank, that he was in fact one of those dull beefy animals to whom alcohol is meat and drink and mistress all in one, quite harmless where women were concerned. And while she suspected Miss Jardine of being “deep”—a term that covered most of the sins in her Decalogue— she knew at heart that this cool and remote creature was not the kind to disport with a man like Klaus. Nevertheless the sight of the trembling young woman excited her. The silken wisp drawn so tightly about Miss Jardine betrayed a figure slender but well filled at the breast and hips, and it revealed to the landlady’s gaze a pair of comely legs. She had not suspected the typist of such properties, indeed she had always thought of her as a plain and somewhat meager person who wore her clothes unfashionably long to hide the fact.
    The sight of this shapely stranger not only excited Mrs. Paradee but aroused in her another emotion. The disdain in her gaze made way for something purely malicious. Like most of her lodgers she had seen in Miss Jardine a superior air that irritated her as much as it amused the others; but chiefly her malice sprang from an incident some months before that Miss Jardine herself had noticed only casually and had long forgotten.
    On the occasion of one of those semiweekly evening visitations which so intrigued the lodgers, the man in the bowler, emerging from the Paradee apartment with his customary rush, had all but knocked down the typist on her way upstairs. Miss Jardine had paused and given the man a surprised glance, and over his shoulder she had caught a glimpse of the landlady about to close the door. Their eyes had met, and Miss Jardine had smiled and passed on. It was no more than that. Whether Mrs. Paradee’s hair was up or down, how she was clad or if indeed was clad at all, and what sort of look she had on her face in that unguarded moment as she sped her parting guest, the young woman on the landing could not see or at any rate had failed to notice. But in her glance and smile the landlady had fancied every sort of surmise and condemnation. She was infuriated. For weeks she watched the girl’s face, seeking a sign of what she knew or suspected or merely imagined. For months she had turned her ear to the fleeting gossip of the stairs and landings, hearing indeed nothing complimentary but nothing to confirm or dispel her doubts.
    And now, magically, this superior person cringed before her, caught in a scene of utter disgrace! Mrs. Paradee was inclined to laugh by the sheer justice of the thing; and she was elated to find herself in the familiar roles of witness, prosecutor, judge and executioner, and in a position to return what she had come to regard as a monstrous slight on her own virtue. That the slight was no more tangible than the virtue did not matter a bit. With the wide eyes of a frightened child Miss Jardine beheld a rising menace in the thin line of the mouth, the tense nostrils and the glittering black gaze that confronted