Free The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey Page A

opening the evening paper (printed that morning in London), when they came to the office on Friday he could do something to put the affair on a more personal basis. To wipe out the memory of that first unhappy refusal.
    The quiet of the old house soothed him. Christina had been closeted in her room for two days, in prayer and meditation, and Aunt Lin was in the kitchen preparing dinner. There was a gay letter from Lettice, his only sister, who had driven a truck for several years of a bloody war, fallen in love with a tall silent Canadian, and was now raising five blond brats in Saskatchewan. “Come out soon, Robin dear,” she finished, “before the brats grow up and before the moss grows right round you. You know how bad Aunt Lin is for you!” He could hear her saying it. She and Aunt Lin had never seen eye to eye.
    He was smiling, relaxed and reminiscent, when both his quiet and his peace were shattered by the irruption of Nevil.
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me she was like that!” Nevil demanded.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThe Sharpe woman! Why didn’t you tell me?”
    â€œI didn’t expect you would meet her,” Robert said. “All you had to do was drop the letter through the door.”
    â€œThere was nothing in the door to drop it through, so I rang, and they had just come back from wherever they were. Anyhow, she answered it.”
    â€œI thought she slept in the afternoons.”
    â€œI don’t believe she ever sleeps. She doesn’t belong to the human family at all. She is all compact of fire and metal.”
    â€œI know she’s a very rude old woman, but you have to make allowances. She has had a very hard—”
    â€œOld? Who are you talking about?”
    â€œOld Mrs. Sharpe, of course.”
    â€œI didn’t even see old Mrs. Sharpe. I’m talking about Marion.”
    â€œMarion Sharpe? And how did you know her name was Marion?”
    â€œShe told me. It does suit her, doesn’t it? She couldn’t be anything but Marion.”
    â€œYou seem to have become remarkably intimate for a doorstep acquaintance.”
    â€œOh, she gave me tea.”
    â€œTea! I thought you were in a desperate hurry to see a French film.”
    â€œI’m never in a desperate hurry to do anything when a woman like Marion Sharpe invites me to tea. Have you noticed her eyes? But of course you have. You’re her lawyer. That wonderful shading of grey into hazel. And the way her eyebrows lie above them, like the brushmark of a painter genius. Winged eyebrows, they are. I made a poem about them on the way home. Do you want to hear it?”
    â€œNo,” Robert said firmly. “Did you enjoy your film?”
    â€œOh, I didn’t go.”
    â€œYou didn’t go!”
    â€œI told you I had tea with Marion instead.”
    â€œYou mean you have been at The Franchise the whole afternoon!”
    â€œI suppose I have,” Nevil said dreamily, “but, my God, it didn’t seem more than seven minutes.”
    â€œAnd what happened to your thirst for French cinema?”
    â€œBut Marion is French film. Even you must see that!” Robert winced at the “even you.” “Why bother with the shadow, whenyou can be with the reality? Reality. That is her great quality, isn’t it? I’ve never met anyone as real as Marion is.”
    â€œNot even Rosemary?” Robert was in the state known to Aunt Lin as “put out.”
    â€œOh, Rosemary is a darling, and I’m going to marry her, but that is quite a different thing.”
    â€œIs it?” said Robert, with deceptive meekness.
    â€œOf course. People don’t marry women like Marion Sharpe, any more than they marry winds and clouds. Any more than they marry Joan of Arc. It’s positively blasphemous to consider marriage in relation to a woman like that. She spoke very nicely of you, by the way.”
    â€œThat was kind of her.”
    The tone was