“Yes, I know,” Bess agreed, “but it’s such a perfectly entrancing subject. She’s a darling and so is he. Why, he’s almost as nice as Walter Mason,” she added slyly.
Nan ignored this last. “Walker is nice, isn’t he?” she said. “And he and Alice do look dear together.”
“He’s swell,” Bess said slangily. “He’s tall and handsome and full of fun. Do you know, I think sometimes that Mr. MacKenzie does like him, for all the way he calls him ‘lazy’ and a ‘no-good reporter.’”
“Of course he does,” Nan agreed, “and Walker likes him too. I just know it.”
Bess looked at Nan questioningly at this latter bit of information. Did Nan know something she didn’t know?
“Anyway, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens,” Nan tried to dismiss the subject.
“I suppose so,” Bess sighed, “but it would be such fun to be an attendant at a wedding.”
“Oh, Bessie,” Nan ruffled her friend’s hair, “you’re such a romantic soul. I’ll bet that you think that if worse came to worse and cousin Adair insisted that Alice marry someone else, Walker would ride up on a charger and carry Alice off the way young Lochinvar did in that poem we learned back in the fifth grade. Remember?”
“You mean the one about Lochinvar coming up out of the West, ‘through all the wide world his steed was the best,’” Bess laughed.
“Yes, that’s the one,” Nan assented. “Remember how we loved that thing and how we used to say over and over again the stanza that followed the one where he asked the bride to dance with him