“Fanny!” exclaimed her sister-in-law. “You’re not in earnest?”
“I am, though!”
Isabel’s sweet-toned laugh came out of the dusk where she sat. “Then you didn’t mean it when you told Eugene you’d enjoyed the drive this afternoon?”
“I didn’t say it so very enthusiastically, did I?”
“Perhaps not, but he certainly thought he’d pleased you.”
“I don’t think I gave him any right to think he’d pleased me” Fanny said slowly.
“Why not? Why shouldn’t you, Fanny?”
Fanny did not reply at once, and when she did, her voice was almost inaudible, but much more reproachful than plaintive. “I hardly think I’d want any one to get the notion he’d pleased me just now. It hardly seems time, yet—to me.”
Isabel made no response, and for a time the only sound upon the dark veranda was the creaking of the wicker rocking-chair in which Fanny sat—a creaking which seemed to denote content and placidity on the part of the chair’s occupant, though at this juncture a series of human shrieks could have been little more eloquent of emotional disturbance. However, the creaking gave its hearer one great advantage: it could be ignored.
“Have you given up smoking, George?” Isabel asked presently.