"Don't think I've been tattling," said Sally. "Whatever my faults may be, I haven't a Rubber Neck."
I didn't know in the least what she meant; but afterwards she explained that if your neck is always pivoting round, to pry into other people's affairs, it is a Rubber Neck, and I shall remember the expression to tell Stan when I go home. He will like to add it to his collection of strange beasts.
Mrs. Ess Kay partly turned her back upon Sally. "The dear Duchess" (she always speaks of Mother in that way,) "the dear Duchess has entrusted you to my charge, Betty, and I don't know what I shall do if you take advantage of me by playing naughty tricks whenever I am incapacitated from chaperoning you for half an hour."
One would have thought I was a trained dog! I simply stared with saucer eyes, and she went on. "Mrs. Collingwood came in to enquire for my headache, and she told me that you have been running about begging for money to give to a common man in the steerage. I sent instantly for Sally, but she either knows, or pretends to know nothing."
I rushed into explanations, sure that when Mrs. Ess Kay understood, I should be pronounced "not guilty." But to my surprise, her chin grew squarer and squarer, and her eyes harder and lighter, till they looked almost white.
"I don't want to be harsh," she said at last, in the tone people use when they're walking on the ragged edge of their patience, "but for the Duchess's sake, I must be firm. It was very wrong of Tommy Doremus to let you make yourself so conspicuous. This may lead to your being dreadfully misunderstood and putting yourself and all of us in a false position. The man may be a butcher for all you know."
"His complexion isn't pink and white enough for a butcher's," said I. "Besides, I thought that in America one man was as good as another."
"You were never more mistaken in your life, my dear girl; and the sooner you correct such an impression the better, or you may get into serious trouble from which I can't save you. If the steerage man isn't a butcher, he's probably a professional swimmer, and the whole thing was a scheme, to advertise himself. In fact, I am pretty certain from what Mrs. Collingwood said, it was that. And I want you to promise me solemnly that you will not go around helping to advertise the creature any more. If you say you admire such a person, people will think you're like the Matinée Girls, who wait at stage doors and run after actors."
I was so angry, that I "talked back"; and it finally ended in our relations being somewhat strained at dinner, which ruined my appetite, until a peculiarly soothing iced pudding came on.
Afterwards, Mrs. Ess Kay was cool to Mr. Doremus, and would have been cold, I think, if he weren't Mrs. Van der Windt's cousin. He lounged up to our place on deck to give me the news that the Third Class Hero (as he calls the bronze young man) refused to be Second Class. He had asked permission to give the cabin offered him to the child whose life he had saved, and the mother.