“She was perfectly awful,” Lena insisted sharply. “Do you have to let her call you ‘Dan?’ ”
“Why, good gracious, everybody in town calls me ‘Dan,’ and Martha lives next door.”
“I don’t see why you need to be intimate with people merely because they live next door,” Lena said coldly. “I suppose, though, in this heavenly climate you feel because a girl lives next door to you it’s necessary to let her hold your hand quite a little!”
“But she didn’t hold my hand.”
“Didn’t she? It seemed to me I noticed——”
“No, no, no!” he exclaimed. “I only wanted to stop her a minute to say I hoped she’d help make you like it here and be as good a friend to you as she’s always been to me.”
“I see. That’s why you held her hand.”
“But I didn’t——”
“Of course not!” Lena interrupted. “Not more than five minutes or so! And she’s the one you especially want me to be friends with! I never saw a more awful person.”
“But what’s ‘awful’ about her?”