I've got an English
bull-terrier down there that's taken a ribbon or so. If you don't
mind, I'll send him up to you. He--he knows Penelope."
THE CASE OF MRS. MAGNUS
BY BURTON E. STEVENSON
CHAPTER I
The position of confidential family adviser is not without its
drawbacks, and it was with a certain reluctance that I told the office
boy to show Mrs. Magnus in. For Mrs. Magnus was that _bete noire_
of the lawyer--a woman recently widowed, utterly without business
experience, and yet with a firm belief in her ability to manage her
husband's estate. If Mrs. Magnus chose to ruin herself there was, of
course, no reason why I should worry, but it is annoying to have a
person constantly asking for advice and as constantly disregarding it.
I never really understood why Mrs. Magnus asked for advice at all.
She was a woman of about fifty, thin and nervous, with a curious habit
of compressing her lips into a tight knot, under the impression, I
suppose, that the result indicated strength of character. Peter
Magnus had married her when he was only an obscure clerk in the great
commission house which he was afterward to own, and she was a school
teacher or governess, or something of that sort. Perhaps she was a
little ahead of him intellectually at the start, but he had broadened
and developed, while she had narrowed and dried up, but she never lost
the illusion of her mental supremacy, nor the idea that she had, in
some dim way, married beneath her.
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