She bit her underlip. I could have thought it was a swollen red enough little affair already.
“Why for you?” she asked.
“You can’t expect me to welcome your reappearance,” I said.
“Can’t I?” she answered. “Well, looks ought to count for something with you by now. Don’t they?”
“I mature slowly, Miss Christmas.”
“Call me Ira.”
“Certainly I sha’n’t. It would be presumption.”
“I don’t know that it would. My father’s father was a chemist. I have found that out. He kept a shop and invented a pill and made a fortune over it. People would take it. It became a sort of infection. A royal princess caught it, and then it was all over with him. He bought a pedigree, in Wardour Street, and imposed it on the world. It would swallow anything from him.”
“Well, my father’s father never invented anything that I know—not even a family. I date from yesterday; and, as to pills, the pillmaker’s granddaughter was the bitterest I ever had to swallow.”
She was not offended, it seemed.