The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford Page A

Colonel Primrose and Steve Donaldson joined us and we stood looking down on the crowded floor. At the opposite end of the room was the Victorian portrait of the Victorian gentleman who gave the hall. Under it sat Lowell Nash.
    “Oh dear!” I said. “That means she’s going to be an old maid.”
    “Which shows,” Colonel Primrose observed, “how tradition—even in Georgetown—is garbled in seventy years. It used to mean you simply didn’t get any partners for the evening.”
    “I expect Lowell isn’t worrying about either,” Iris said, smiling suddenly at Steve.
    “Not about the partner end of it,” he agreed with a grin. There were at least eight young men standing around her, with Mac, as usual, glowering in a corner.
    “Shall we dance?” I heard Steve say. In a moment we saw them below us on the crowded floor.
    “I take it,” Colonel Primrose remarked casually, “Mr. Donaldson is head over heels in love with the beautiful Iris. And Iris either thinks or pretends to think it’s Lowell.”
    “Why pretends?”
    “Surely, Mrs. Latham, a woman knows when a man’s in love with her.”
    I suppose it was because of Sergeant Buck and Lilac that I avoided looking at him.
    “Not necessarily,” I said. “She may be too caught up in general complications to sort things out very clearly.”
    He smiled. “Not to change the subject at all—why didn’t you let me know you were home?”
    “Didn’t Sergeant Buck tell you?—I met him in Gilbert St. Martin’s shop.”
    “He didn’t. But I saw something had soured him. And there’s no use being a detective of sorts if you can’t deduce things to your own advantage from time to time.”
    “That couldn’t have taken a lot of detecting,” I said. “Meaning Buck’s damnably transparent?”
    “He is, rather, isn’t he?” I answered. Then I added, quite on the impulse of the moment and because it had to be said sooner or later, “I only wish he’d get it out of his head that I want to marry you.”
    Colonel Primrose cocked his head down and looked around at me the way he does.
    “You don’t want to, I take it.”
    “No-you’re quite safe, Colonel.”
    “I’ve been afraid that was what you were going to say,” he said with a quick smile.
    “And rather relieved on the whole?”
    “What do you think?”
    He asked it so seriously that I changed the subject, out of sheer sympathy for Sergeant Buck.
    “Have you seen much of the Nashes recently?”
    He smiled again.
    “From time to time.”
    “I feel terribly sorry for Iris,” I said.
    “Do you really,” he said shortly. I looked at him, a little surprised. He got up abruptly. “Let’s dance.”
    I thought “Oh dear!” And yet, of course, I could have known he’d be stuffy.
    It was half-past one when we left Linthicum Hall. I hadn’t seen much of Lowell, except to say Hello and find out that she was pretty mad at Angie for not showing up.
    “I suppose he’s brooding about that silly dust-up with dad Christmas Eve,” she said impatiently.
    If she had learned that her mother was seriously ill there was no evidence of it. She and Mac were going, they said, as soon as they’d made a long enough showing to satisfy Mac’s uncle, who’s by way of being a local big shot—banker and what not. Iris and Steve had joined a crowd of young married people in one corner, Colonel Primrose and I got stymied by a doddering old gentleman who’d attended the ball in 1882 with a famous beauty I’d never heard of and had a duel with her husband out by the Chain Bridge the next day. We’d still be there talking to him if Steve hadn’t come and said Iris wanted to go home.
    She was in the dressing room getting her white ermine cape when I came in. Her face was almost the color of the fur. She looked desperately unhappy. It occurred to me that she’d probably been having an encounter with her stepdaughter. Heaven knows why I chose that moment to remark casually that I hadn’t seen the St. Martins; it