"Better throw off your furs and that heavy jacket in this over-heated car," was his only answer. "You'll take cold when you get off if you don't." She thanked him for the suggestion, and, as he hung her wraps over the back of the seat, settled herself comfortably for the hour's ride.
"Now tell me all about it," he began as the car started. "All that you've been doing these last months. Of course I've kept up with you in the papers. I know that you went here and went there, and that you wore sky-blue pink folderols at this banquet and velvet satin crêpe de chine at the Country Club dinner, with feathers and jewels to match, but that's no more than all the rest of the world knows. I want to be let in on the ground floor and told about the inner workings of this social whirl. How have you managed to do it all? To vibrate between town and country and not peg out. You look as fresh as a daisy; as if the pace that kills agrees with you."
"I haven't vibrated much," she answered. "I've made Aunt Jane's house my headquartahs, and you know what a crank she is about hygiene. Every moment not actually engaged in 'whirling' she had reduced to a system of simple living. What I have suffered in the way of naps in a darkened room when I wasn't sleepy, and hot milk when I loathed the idea of swallowing anything, and gymnastic exercises in the attic when the weathah was too bad for long walks, would fill a volume."
"Is the game worth the candle?" he asked soberly.
She hesitated. "Well, yes. For a season anyhow. I wouldn't want to keep up such a round yeah aftah yeah, but I have had a good time, and I must confess it's awfully nice to be really grown up and have everybody treat you with the consideration due yoah age."
They were out in the open country now. The car stopped, and as the door opened to admit a passenger, the shrill voices of some children skating on an ice pond near the road floated cheerily in. Lloyd looked out the window with a smile at the gay scene.
"I'd like to be out there with them," she confessed. "Look at that little girl in the red mittens and Tam O'Shanter. She skates exactly the way Katie Mallard used to. Oh, deah, didn't we used to have fun with her down on our ice pond?"
"Do you remember the day Malcolm broke through when he was trying to cake-walk on the ice?" asked Rob with a reminiscent grin.
"He was laughing about that only last week when he took me to the Country Club dinnah. I've seen a lot of Malcolm this wintah."
"I thought he was rushing Molly Standforth."