"I won't go till nearly supper time," Nan concluded, "and I will come back as soon after as it is decent. To tell you the truth," she whispered to Mary Lee as they went out of the room with their arms around each other, "Charlotte and I had a little spat. Mrs. Bobs doesn't know anything about it unless Charlotte has told her, and it will make it sort of awkward, you see."
"What was it about?" asked Mary Lee. Nan told her.
"Well," decided the impartial Mary Lee, "I think it was as much your fault as hers. In the first place you had no right to ask her to run your errands."
"She didn't run any."
"Well, you asked her to, and in the second place you invited her to go to the Fairy Dell with you, and you ought to have seen to it that she got home all right. She is a stranger here and she was your company."
"She is not so very much more of a stranger than we are, and Jean had to be looked after."
"Suppose she did; it wouldn't have hurt you to have walked home with her and let Li Hung go home with Jean. He would have taken the best of care of her, you know."
Nan sighed. "Oh, I suppose I was thinking of my side of the question and not hers at all, but it made me mad when she was so deathly afraid of doing anything unusual or of being seen with any one who did."
"You see," said Mary Lee bringing forward a most forceful argument, "you wouldn't like her to think we Virginians could be rude. We would hate her to go back to Boston and say we hadn't been properly polite."
That decided Nan. "I suppose I'd better go and make up. I reckon some of it was my fault. She is really a very nice girl, but her ways aren't ours and she doesn't take to being free and easy. She thinks so much of what people will say and she is always talking about whether we are doing our 'dooty.' I have no doubt she thinks it was my 'dooty' to stick with her when I brought her out with me, and I reckon it really was. I know perfectly well she wouldn't have done me that mean way, and I reckon that is half the reason why I am mad. I wish you would go over with me, Mary Lee; it would take off the edge."