"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 173 - Once Over Lightly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

тАЬMine.тАЭ

тАЬI didn't know you had one,тАЭ I said. тАЬListen, you beautiful wench, if you're trying to pass some antiquated
boy-friend off asтАФтАЭ

тАЬOh, don't be so stinking moral,тАЭ she said.

тАЬHe's really your Uncle?тАЭ

тАЬMy mother's brother. God help her,тАЭ Glacia said.
That should sort of prepare me for anything, I thought. I hadn't known Glacia's family too well when I
was a kid growing up in Kansas City, because we lived in the part of town where we had backyards and
washings were hung there. The Lorings had lived four blocks over, not a great distance, but quite a long
way measured in the snobbery scale. Glacia Loring and I ended up attending the same high school, and
we must have found something in commonтАФas I recall, we were both going to become actresses at the
time, and got together in school theatricalsтАФand we saw quite a lot of each other.

Were we friends as kids? I don't know. I doubt it, but it would depend on what the definition for
friendship was. We were together a lot. We fought over the same boys, and got stuffed at the same soda
fountains. I suppose we sort of rubbed off on each other. I toning Glacia down a little, and she giving me
more glisten. But I don't know about that either. I do know my mother didn't approve of Glacia's folks,
and Glacia evidently had similar trouble at home, because she never took me there.

Not that Glacia's folks were snobs. They were screwballs. They just plain resented common sense, and
they maintained that the conventional and the ordinary was slops for pigs. I think Glacia's mother and
father were married in an airplane circling over Kansas City as a publicity stunt, and I knew that her
grandfather on the maternal side had maintained that he, not Peary nor Cook, had been first to discover
the North Pole, and that he had sued, or threatened to sue, both Admiral Peary and Cook for daring to
lay claim to the Pole. This old fellow would be the sire of Glacia's Uncle Waldo, if there was really such
an individual. And since Uncle Waldo was a sprig on such a goofer-tree, anything might be expected of
him.

It might have been the cockeyed hotel, but I expected to find Uncle Waldo covered with monkeys. I
wouldn't have been surprised, anyway.

What I met was a nice-looking old gentleman, not much taller than I am, an old gaffer made of oak and
weather-cured hide. He wore tan flannel trousers with sandals, and a terrific checkered shirt. He was
sitting in the bar which overlooked a swimming pool, and he was the only person in the place with a glass
of milk in front of him. He looked me over.

тАЬA seaworthy seeming craft,тАЭ he remarked.

That didn't sound too much like a compliment, but I gathered it was. He had no more to say until he had
given Glacia's scanty bathing costume a disapproving nose-wrinkling, and watched me order a drink. I
ordered ginger ale with nothing in it, because my stomach was still in some doubts about what to do over
the lightplane ride. Apparently, what I ordered met with approval, because Uncle Waldo got around to
dropping an oracular opinion.

тАЬShe'll do,тАЭ he said.