George saw her looking rather thoughtful, and pressed his advantage. Suppose Betty went and saw Miss Eliot personally, sometime today, and urged her to reconsider. The business didn't amount to much, it was true, and it no doubt involved the adjustment of some troublesome details. But unless Miss Eliot would undertake it, he wouldn't know just where to turn. Alys had quarreled with Allen, and Sampson was a skate. And perhaps a little plain talk to Alys about the condition of the cottages--"from one of her own sex," George said this darkly and looked away out of the window at the time--might be productive of good. "All right," Betty agreed, "I'll see what I can do. It's kind of hard to go to a woman you barely know by sight, and talk to her about her duty, but I guess I'm game. If you can spare me, I'll go now and get it over with." There were no frills about Edith Eliot's real estate office, though the air of it was comfortably busy and prosperous. The place had once been a store. An architect's presentation of an apartment building, now rather dusty, occupied the show-window. There was desk accommodation for two or three of those bright young men who make a selection of keys and take people about to look at houses; there was a stenographer's desk with a stenographer sitting at it; and back of a table in the corner, in the attitude of one making herself as comfortable as the heat of the day would permit, while she scowled over a voluminous typewritten document, was E. Eliot herself. It was almost superfluous to mention that her name was Edith. She never signed it, and there was no one, in Whitewater anyway, who called her by it. She was a big-boned young woman (that is, if you call the middle thirties young), with an intelligent, homely face, which probably got the attraction some people surprisingly found in it from the fact that she thought nothing about its looks one way or the other. It was rather red when Betty came in, and she was making it rapidly redder with the vigorous ministrations of a man's-size handkerchief. She greeted Betty with a cordial "how-de-doo," motioned her to the other chair at the table (Betty had a fleeting wish that she might have dusted it before she sat down), and asked what she could do for her. "I'm from Mr. Remington's office," Betty said, "Remington and Evans. He wrote you a note this morning about some cottages that belong to a cousin of his, Mrs. Brewster-Smith." "I answered that note by his own messenger," said E. Eliot. "He should have got the reply before this." "Oh, he got it," said Betty, "and was rather upset about it. What I've come for, is to urge you to reconsider."