About this story
Sovereigns, guineas, and the etiquette of a respectable address all get worked out in public before Miss Blake will rent you a room on trial. At church the next morning, Philip's sister Frida and her husband Robert treat you as a curiosity and a danger at once, until Frida alone asks why you chose this house to enter next.
How it opens
You entered Brackenhurst on a Saturday afternoon with no luggage and carefully chosen English clothes.
Philip ChristyI looked both ways a moment ago; you seem to have arrived without using the road.
The civil servant's curiosity struggled against rules forbidding conversation with unplaced strangers.
Philip ChristyIf you need lodgings, Miss Blake sometimes receives respectable gentlemen.
Choose
Thank him and ask what evidence makes a stranger respectable here.
Ask him to guide you to Miss Blake and postpone every personal question.