"What! did you?" I exclaimed in surprise. "You mean to say you enjoyed sitting on that lounge and seeing Miss Devereaux snub that unfortunate little woman in the hideous bonnet?"
"Well, no, not that part," admitted Nannie.
"And did you enjoy the pater's smashing the Doulton bowl?"
"Oh, no, of course not," Nannie returned, somewhat indignantly.
"Then where did the enjoyment come in?" I persisted.
"I can't tell you why, or when, or how, but I enjoyed it," was Nannie's reply; and then, "without rhyme or reason," as nurse says, she blushed a vivid red.
"Do look at her!" teased Phil. "Why, Nancy, it isn't against the law to have enjoyed yourself. What're you blushing for?"
"I'm sure I don't know," my twinnie answered, with such a look of perplexity in her sweet, honest eyes that we had to laugh. Whereupon she blushed rosier than ever, even to her ears and her pretty throat, and running over to me, hid her flushed face on my shoulder. "Please stop teasing, Fee," she whispered.
Now if anybody was teasing just then Phil was in it, and I started to tell her so; but Phil interrupted: "One more county to be heard from," he declared, "and that's you, most noble Felix. Are you, like Nora, hankering after the unattainable in the shape of daily receptions?"
"Can't say that I'm devoured with a desire that way," I confessed with a grin. "I wouldn't go over this afternoon's experience for a farm! As they say in the novels, my feelings can be better imagined than described when I walked into the Blackwoods' library and saw the pater standing in the midst of the shattered vase à la Marius in the ruins of Carthage. Had I but owned a genii, we'd have been whisked out of that room and home in about two seconds. No, on calm reflection, I forswear receptions for the future."