Mr. Page, would you like to hear about a very large hat?” Leo suspected this was a maneuver to distract him from asking about Mildred Hoggett. But he couldn’t very well insist that they cough up whatever secrets they were hiding. So he made a murmur of interest. “Oh, no, Cora,” Miss Pickering said, grabbing the lumpy mass of yarn out of the other lady’s hands and regarding it balefully. “Not that story.” Leo had the sense that even in this overheated sitting room, they were surrounded by secrets, that any conversational gambit was straying into forbidden territory. He felt at once disoriented
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