“Never you be without a hit of fancy-work, girls, when you wish to impress. Men seem to think a girl must be so sweet and womanly who can sit for hours wagging a crochet-hook and a bit of thread at them. As for the future mother-in-law, she always imagines a girl is more likely to turn out domesticated if she cannot keep her hands still for ten minutes. Besides, a bit of drawn-thread work, or whatever it is, gives you something to look at when you don’t exactly know what to say next.”
The last reason was mine. I certainly did not know what to say when the Governor’s mother remarked softly:
“You know, Nancy, you are just what I hoped you would be.”
“Am I?”
I felt an unutterable little cad.
Yes, Mr. William Waters! And who forced me into the position of feeling like this?
“So pretty and gentle and quiet, and yet you ‘see’ things with those brown eyes of yours,” pronounced Mrs. Waters. “At first I feared it was impossible that any girl who had only met my boy just in business-hours, and wearing that office-mask he has to put on, could grow to care for him as we do; but I see you could understand. You guessed that all that brusqueness and peremptory manner were just the armour for his sensitiveness; you would see that he has to put on that manner to hide the awful truth that at the bottom of his heart he is naturally as shy and nervous as Blanche and I are. I believe,” she laughed softly, “that that’s why he never allows us to call at the office while we’re in town! The staff might suspect, seeing us, that he has another sort of manner than the terrible one he speaks through the telephone with! I dare say that even you were taken in by it at first, weren’t you? Until he began to reveal his real self to you, I expect you looked upon him merely as a business-machine, didn’t you, Nancy?”
“I suppose I did,” I murmured, feeling more uncomfortable at every word uttered by this dear, innocent lady, who had created such an idealized version of her son’s character.
“And when did you begin to find out the real Billy?”
Here was a nice question! Thank goodness I was spared the answering of it!