Miss Rittingway checked me with a look.
“A man,” she said, “not only is greatly hampered in his view of these things, but he always appears to resent a woman’s ability to dominate social circumstances. It really distresses him to find that his initiation is not a finality, to discover that her last word is more potent than his first.”
“A cruel tirade,” I declared, “when I was only expressing my admiring astonishment or something of that import. As for her last word, even when you don’t say it—”
At this I saw the Judge coming back. “Judge,” I called down to him, “Miss Rittingway was just saying that she would like to have from you a judicial opinion on chaperons.”
“Well,” said the Judge, failing to observe Miss Rittingway’s protest, “there is a legal pleasantry which expresses itself in the query, ‘Who is to watch the trustee?’ I am going over there to arrange about the lunch for this interesting party, and then I am coming back to do some watching myself.”
“Don’t you think,” I asked Miss Rittingway when the Judge had gone again, “that there is a touch of particular amiability in the Judge’s manner?”
“I think you had better go and help him about the luncheon,” was what Miss Rittingway said.
