The Saint Around the World

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“I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in helping me find my husband,” said the blonde.

“Frankly, I’ve heard a lot more exciting propositions,” Simon Templar admitted. “If he doesn’t have enough sense to appreciate you, why don’t we just let him stay lost, and have a ball?”

“But I really want him back,” she said. “You see, we’ve only been married a week, so I haven’t had time to get tired of him.”

Simon sipped his Dry Sack.

“All right,” he said. “Give me a clue. What was it about this bridegroom that impressed you so much, darling?”

“The name,” she said, “is Lona Dayne.”

“Well, that’s unusual, anyway. He must have to listen to a lot of funny cracks about it.”

“Lona Dayne is my name, idiot. Not ‘darling.’  ”

“Oh.”

He regarded her with pleasantly augmented interest. It had been an entirely shallow and stereotyped reaction, he realized, to identify and pigeonhole her so summarily as “the blonde.” Certainly she had the hair, of a tint much paler than straw, which his worldly eye inevitably measured against her light brown eyes and traced back from there to the alchemy of some beauty parlor — but wasn’t it a mere cliché of fiction that expensively rinsed blondes were by contrary definition cheap, while the only good ones owed their coloring solely to a lucky combination of chromosomes? The pretty face and approximately 35-23-35 vital statistics which convention also attributes to blondes appeared to be hers without any important debt to artifice. And she could get away with calling him Idiot, when she smiled in that provocatively intimate way while she said it.

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