"'Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart,'" Elizabeth repeated to herself. "'I have never called you this and I have no right to call you so now.'" That was what her Buddy had written to Ruth Farraday, and Ruth Farraday, not knowing, was leaning back in Piggy Chambers' great French car, and letting him tell her that she looked like a snow maiden.
"My brother says that southern France is much more beautiful—was much more beautiful than England," she said aloud. "He—he helped to break the Hindenburg Line, you know."
"Did he?" said Mr. Piggy Chambers, civilly.
"My—my father would have gone, I think, but he wasn't able to get away from his business."
"If he was in the steel business, he would have been industrially exempted, anyway."
"He—he wouldn't have wanted to be industrially exempted," was on the tip of Elizabeth's tongue, but she remembered that she was talking to her host of the day. "It won't get me very far to be ill-bred and impolite all of a sudden," she thought, sensibly. "Mr. Piggy Chambers might just as well think that the members of our family are well brought up." Provincetown reminded Mr. Chambers a little of a Dutch fishing village, which he described at great length.
"Anybody would think he had just discovered Abroad," Peggy scolded in an undertone. "Ruth likes all that travelogue stuff, because she was so crazy to get there and couldn't. Now we are going to get out and walk, I am thankful to say, but if he tries to lose us, don't let him, that's all!"
Mr. Chambers did try to lose them. He tried bribing them with ice-cream and they took the ice-cream, but consumed it in time to join the two before they had strolled more than three blocks. He suggested that the chauffeur take the two girls in the car to examine the Truro lights a mile or two back from the course over which they had just come, while he and Miss Ruth strolled along the shore.
"I'd rather stay here with Ruthie," Peggy insisted, flatly, and Elizabeth could not determine whether Ruth was pleased or displeased, for she made no display of either emotion.
"If she wanted us to go, I think perhaps she would say so, but I don't know. Grown-up girls don't seem to think they can say what they mean, the way children do," she thought.