Talking? I didn’t need to be told that, from the moment they’d seen, out of the landing window, the last of that taxi in which the Governor and his private clerk had driven off, to the moment they had heard my returning footstep on the stairs, they had done nothing but talk about me and my incredible, my epic lunch.
As I drew the hat-pins from the admired new hat, I prepared for a hurricane of comments and questions.
None came. Not one of the girls seemed to have a word to say to me!
Perhaps they thought they would hear more by seeming not too eager. (That’s rather Miss Robinson’s style of “drawing out” her companions.)
Perhaps they considered the subject too vast for immediate discussion. Perhaps, for they are all good-natured girls, they had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t fair to “rag” me about it—that I might be feeling too utterly nervous and flurried over the unexpected (?) event.
They didn’t even ask me whether I had enjoyed myself! I even saw them, distinctly, avoid looking at me.
Only Miss Holt’s eyes seemed drawn, as if in spite of herself, to the flowers I was taking out of my coat to put in water in the grimy jam-jar on the dressing-table that so often holds Smithie’s bunch of violets; and it was Miss Holt who breathed an involuntary—
“I say, what lovely carnations!”
“Do have some,” I said, as a matter of course, dividing the cluster and holding out half to her.