“Of course not!” Bess answered resentfully. “How could I? I didn’t even have my check yet for the table. There wasn’t anything to do,” she added regretfully, “except to take a place behind her in line and listen to her make her demands of the steward.”
“Now we are getting someplace,” Laura leaned forward as Bess let drop this piece of information. “What did you find out about her?”
Nan shook her head at this line of conversation. She did not approve of eavesdropping. But no one paid any attention to her.
“Oh, it makes me angry all over again to think of it,” Bess jerked at the steamer rug again. “As I said before, she didn’t pay any attention to me. I might have been just anyone.”
“She gave the steward her passport, stepped back slightly, almost treading on my feet, and looked at him through a lorget—”
“You mean lorgnette,” Laura interrupted, “but it doesn’t matter. Go ahead.”
“Lorgnette, then,” Bess corrected. “Anyway, she looked at the steward through it as though he had been put there just to do as she ordered, as though he was a puppet that she could dangle as she wished.
“You know how she does it in that stuck-up way of hers. Why, if I had been him, I would have thrown the plans right in her face. But he was just as meek as I am before Mrs. Cupp, the fool!”
“Bess, do be careful,” Nan put a restraining hand over her mouth, “other people will hear you.”
Bess lowered her voice as she went on. “She told him that he had made a mistake, a perfectly dreadful mistake. Devastating, I think, was the word she used—whatever that means. At any rate, he had given her a stub for a table down here in Tourist Class.”