“Iley sont me over,” he said finally. “She was skeered you-all wouldn’t bring any plates.”
Neither Judith nor Creed offered any explanation. Instead:
“Well, I don’t see how you’re goin’ to help anything,” said the girl bitterly—any presence must have been hateful to her which interrupted or forestalled what Creed would certainly have said, that for which her whole twenty years had waited.
“Oh, I’ve got the plates,” chuckled Blatch, jingling a bulky package under his arm.
“Why, how did you——” began Judith in amazement.
“Uh-huh, I’ve got my own little trick of gittin’ in whar I choose to go,” declared Turrentine. He leaned around and looked meaningly at the man on her other side, then questioned, “How long do you-all reckon I’d been thar?” and examined them keenly in the shadowy half light.
But neither hastened to disclaim or explain, neither seemed in any degree embarrassed, though to both his bearing was plainly almost intolerable. Thereafter they walked in silence which was scarcely broken till they reached the gate and Iley came shrilling out to meet them demanding,
“Did you get them thar plates from Miz. Lusk’s, you Blatch Turrentine?”
Judith looked at him with angry scorn. It was the old tyrannical trick which she had known from her childhood up, the attempt to maintain an ascendency over her by appearing to know everything and be everywhere—“like he was the Lord-a’mighty Hisself,” she muttered indignantly, as Creed joined a group of young men, and she passed in to her necessary activities as hostess.
Judith Barrier’s play-party won to its close with light hearts and light feet, with heavy hearts which the weary body would fain have denied, with love and laughter, with jealousy and chagrin, with the slanted look of envy, of furtive admiration, or of disparagement, from feminine eyes at the costumes of other women, just as any ball does.