"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover that had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's going to take me up soon, you know, again."
Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole of the girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time" of meeting him—whenever it should be.
CHAPTER X
LESLIE, ON "THE ROOTS OF THE ROSE"
Leslie Long was lounging in a rickety deck-chair under the acacia tree that overshadowed the small lawn behind the Ladies' Residential Club. Miss Long looked nonchalantly untidy and her hair was coming down again. But she had an eye to an occasion on which she meant to shine. She was carefully darning a pair of silk stockings, stockings she was to wear with her all-mauve Nijinski rig at a costume dance in a week's time. She was looking forward to that dance.
It was a late Saturday afternoon, a fortnight after that Saturday that Gwenna Williams had spent in the country with the Dampier boy. Most of the girls in the Club were out somewhere now. Only one of the students from the College of Music was practising Liszt's "Liebestraum." Presently however, a sunshine-yellow jersey coat appeared on the steps at the back entrance of the Club. Gwenna Williams was looking out. She saw her chum in the garden and ran down to her; dropping upon the lawn at her feet, and nestling her curly head down upon the lengthy knee that supported the darning-basket.
Gwenna's small face looked petulant, miserable. She felt it. Leslie, to whom, of course, the other girl was as an open book, asked no question. She left that to Gwenna, who had never, so far, made any spoken admission of what had happened—or not happened—since the evening when they had dressed together to go to that dinner-party at the Smiths'. It was Gwenna who asked the first question.
With a stormy and troubled sigh, she broke out, à propos of nothing: "How is one to make him? I mean how is one ever to get a young man to like one if he hardly ever sees one?"