“Come to you for help?” finished Caleb blandly.
General Greer stared at him speechless, apoplectic. Letty, who, despite years of sharp contrary experience, still clung to the fond delusion that she was the spoiled-child-niece of fiction who could twist an otherwise crotchety uncle about her finger, now intervened with one of her inspired blunders. The General’s rumbling voice had drawn attention to their table and Miss Standish conceived a plan of pouring oil on the thundrous waters.
“Why, Uncle Guy!” she pouted prettily, “You’ll make Mr. Conover think you’re in earnest in the dreadful things you are saying to him! It’s just dear Uncle Guy’s bluff way, Mr. Conover, that he picked up when he was commanding soldiers in the army. He’s really a darling old lamb, if only—”
After one long, dumb glare of annihilation at his self-appointed spoiled-child-niece, the darling old lamb stumped away, bleating blasphemously.
“I wonder,” conjectured Desirée, looking up from her tall glass, “why seltzer lemonades make such squizzy sounds through the straw when the glass is almost empty.”
“If that’s a hint,—” observed Caine, glancing about for a waiter.
“No,” she replied. “Only a scientific comment. Oh, it is good to be in the country a day like this.”
“I’ll be in the country for the summer, this time next month,” said Jack Hawarden, “Mother’s taken the same cottage at the Antlers we had last year. It will be nice to get back to the old Adirondacks again.”
“The Adirondacks?” exclaimed Desirée. “Oh, take me along. I’ve always wanted to go there!”
Letty, pained at a suggestion so palpably immodest, looked in frightened appeal to Caine. But Amzi was once more talking to people at the next table. So Miss Standish drew around her an aloofness that lifted her high above any ribaldry that might be bandied about her.