Explore "The Coat of Arms" by Edgar Wallace on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You can like people and appreciate their good intentions and yet resent the thoroughness of their service. Anna liked John Lorney. He was a domineering man, rough of speech, not gently bred. But she liked him and would have liked him more if he had taken his duties as chaperon a little less seriously. She had a life of her own, associations which secured her processions of picture post-cards from the pleasure centres of Europe, ecstatically and incoherently worded. Mr. Lorney, handling her morning mail, used to wonder who "Ella" was, and who was "Boy", and was "Ray" man or woman? He was not superior to reading (so far as he could decipher them) the messages scrawled in the limited space. She lived in a world he did not know, and contact with her revealed nothing of her other life.
Her visit to Sketchley was an act of obedience. She loved the place and she liked the bald Mr. Lorney, but wondered exactly how he had come to be so great a friend of her dead uncle. Being no fool, she knew enough and had seen enough of the "Coat of Arms" to realize that it was no family hotel. Smart people came here--there were two famous golf-courses near enough to excuse their excursions--smart men and smartish women, Very few married folk.