“Beastly!” she ejaculated. And she took a handkerchief and polished her face until its clean tanned skin shone.
“I say,” she went on, tossing her handkerchief into her lap, “I didn’t sleep a wink thinking about you lahst night. I had to run ovah to see you about it directly I could leave poor mamma. Isn’t it too—”
“It’s awfully good of you to come, dear,” Emily got in. “I’ve been intending to have you over to take dinner and spend the day. But now that you are back for good—”
“Back for good!” said Dade, “Mais non, not a bit of it. Mamma says she cawn’t enduah this climate, and who could? We’re off directly we can decide wheah to go. She wants to go up into the White Mountains, but I’ve just got to go some place wheah they have golf links, don’t you know? The truth is, Em, its impossible in this stupid, provincial old hole—I’ll be every bit as fat as mamma if I stay hyah a minute longah—”
“You miss your exercise?” said Emily, lolling back on the cushions of her divan in an indolence of manner that told how remote exercise was from her wish at that moment.
“Don’t speak the word!” cried Dade, pushing out one of her strong hands repellently. “I positively cawn’t find a thing to do. I tried for a cross-country walk yesterday, and got chased by a stupid fahmah, and nearly hooked by a cow—to say nothing of this rich Illinois mud. Mamma owns a few hundred acres of it, Dieu merci, so we don’t have to live hyah on it, though if the—what do you say?—les paysans—keep on crying for a decrease in rent I fawncy you’ll see me back hyah actually digging in it.”
The picture of the Emerson’s tenants which Dade drew struck a pang in Emily’s sociological conscience. She pitied the girl more for her inability to estimate the evils of a system which left her free to wander over the earth seeking that exercise which her clamoring muscles demanded, while those upon whose labors she lived had to exercise more than their overwrought muscles required than she did for the remote prospect of her being doomed to labor on the corn lands of Polk County.
“I’d go down to Zimmerman’s saloon and bowl, if it wouldn’t shock you all to death. But tell me, how do you feel about it?”
“About what—your need of exercise?”
“Mon Dieu, no—about the terrible exposé of that interesting protégé of yours? On ne pourrait le croire—c’est affreux!”