“Lily, put down that dress and listen to me!”
“I’m sure it won’t do,” the daughter said, regretfully; but she obeyed and hung the dress over the back of a chair. Then she turned to her dressing-table mirror and began to remove her small hat. “Are you upset or anything, Mamma?”
“Upset? No! I’m indignant,” Mrs. Dodge explained, fiercely. “If you ever do such a thing to me again——”
“What? Why, I haven’t even seen you since lunch time, Mamma. How could I have been doing anything to you when I wasn’t anywhere around to do it?”
“You know well enough what you did to me! You broke three separate engagements with three separate——”
But Lily’s light laughter interrupted. “Oh, did the poor things call up?” she asked, and seemed to be pleasantly surprised. “Well, my not being here might be doing something to them, maybe,” she added, reflectively;—“but I don’t see how it was doing anything to you, Mamma.”
“You don’t? You break three separate engagements without a word, and leave me here to explain it; and then you say that wasn’t doing anything to me!”
“But I didn’t leave you to do it. I didn’t even know you were going to be home this afternoon. I just thought maybe they’d call up and find I was out, and that’d be the end of it. What in the world did you go to the telephone for, Mamma?”
“Because two of them asked for me.”
“Did they? What for?”