“How very, how rudely untruthful!”
They were here told by Popocatepetl that “lunch dun rade-y.”
Roden’s meals were generally presided over by Virginia, and she came forward to meet him now with a little silver dish of apples in one hand, evidently utterly ignorant of the presence of Mary Erroll. She stopped short, half-way across the room. A shadow as definite and sombre as the shadow from a brilliant cloud upon a laughing grass-field in May settled over her face.
“I’ll have to fix another place,” she said, curtly, and turned her back upon them in order to do so.
Miss Erroll expressed herself charmed with her luncheon. She ate bread and honey with all the gusto of the queen of nursery lore, taking off her riding-gloves and showing long, flower-like hands, that were reflected as whitely in the polished mahogany of the round table as the pale primroses which adorned its centre.
Virginia moved about noiselessly. All at once she stopped beside Roden, and put one hand heavily on the back of his chair. He looked up in some surprise. Her eyes were flashing under her bent brows, like the “brush fires” of her native State under a night horizon.
“I’ll wait on you,” she said, in a smothered voice—“I say I’ll wait on you, but I won’t wait on her.” She dashed down his napkin, which she had lifted from the floor, and strode with her swift, noiseless movements to the door.
“Virginia!” said Roden, aghast—“Virginia!”
“I don’t care!” cried the girl, passionately, swinging open the heavy door—“I don’t care! I ain’t anybody’s nigger!”
She rushed out tempestuously, dragging from one or two rings the heavy portière, which with a native incongruity hung before the door itself.