“I guess so.”
“I’m glad,” the mother said again, and then, as in a musing afterthought, she added, “I only looked on for a little while. I suppose Harrison was there?”
The daughter’s hands instantly stopped moving among the pretty trifles on the dressing-table; she was still from head to foot; but she spoke in a careless enough tone. “Harrison Crisp? Yes. He was there.” And then, as if she must be scrupulously honest about this impression, she added, “At least, I think he was.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed, enlightened. “Anne, didn’t you dance with him at all?”
“With Harrison?” the girl asked, indifferently. “No; I don’t believe I did, now I come to think of it.”
“Didn’t he ask you at all?”
Anne turned upon her with one of those little gasps that express the exasperated weariness of a person who makes the same explanation for the hundreth time. “Mother! If he didn’t ask me, isn’t that the same as not asking me ‘at all’? What’s the difference between not dancing with a person and not dancing with him ‘at all’? What’s the use of making such a commotion about it? Dear me!”
The unreasonableness of this attack might have hurt a sensitive mother; but Mrs. Cromwell was hurt only for her daughter:—petulance was not “like” Anne, and it meant that she was suffering. Mrs. Cromwell was suffering, too, but she did not show it.
“What in the world was Harrison doing all evening?” she asked. “It seems strange he didn’t come near you.”
“There’s no city ordinance compelling every man in this suburb to ask me to dance. I don’t know what he was doing. Dancing with that girl from nowhere, probably.”