“She’s just like anybody else,” he mourned, lifting a tear-stained face from where it had been buried in his arm against the window sill.
“Well, dearest, what did you expect?” I asked, with an absurd inflection of sympathetic woe.
“I don’t know,” admitted Bobsie, “but, somehow, I thought—she would be different.”
Then the bell rang, and we hastened downstairs.
In the dining-room the presentations were being made.
“Mrs. Graham, allow me the Honour of Presenting my friend Mrs. Bo-gardus; Mrs. Bo-gardus, Mrs. Graham.—— Miss Brown, allow me to Present my friend Mrs. Bo-gardus; Mrs. Bo-gardus, Miss Brown.—— Mrs. Hancock, allow me the Honour of Presenting my friend Mrs. Bo-gardus; etc.——”
Immediately our spirits rose. It was an Occasion, after all. Mrs. Hudson felt it, I felt it, Robin felt it. He put out his little hand quite prettily when his turn came.
“So this is the lame boy?” remarked Mrs. Bo-gardus, in a stiff falsetto.
“No,” protested Robin (I don’t think he had ever been called lame, before), “I just hop a little, because sometimes my side aches.”
“It is the same thing, my dear,” explained Mrs. Hudson. “Mrs. Bo-gardus knows all about such matters. She sits on two hospitals boards, and is Secretary of the Free Kindergarten Association.”