While they were taking tea, Anna kept her eyes fixed on the mantel clock, and, having eaten hastily, rose from her place.
“What is the matter?” asked Mally, looking up. “Oh, of course; but, dear me, Anna, I never would bother to get things ready for old Marm Wilson, after the way she grumbles at you. Sit down, do. You’ll never get any thanks, I can tell you that; and what’s the use?”
Anna was at the door already. “I think it’s late enough now to be safe. She only grumbles, you know, if the oil and wood burn out awhile before she gets here. She was to work quite near on Hill Street, to-day, so she will surely be in early.”
“Oh, well, go on if you’ve a mind to. I suppose it is forlorn on a night like this for the poor old creature to find her house all dark and cold,” Mally spoke carelessly, half to herself. Anna was already half-way downstairs.
Mrs. Wilson was their houseowner, a seamstress of narrow means and narrower life whose upper rooms they rented.
An hour later the upper sitting room was suddenly enlivened and almost filled, as far as seating capacity was concerned, by a group of Mally’s friends, who had come to escort her to an evening gathering. These young men and maidens, whom Anna had scarcely seen before, seemed to explain the new Mally to her, and to place her at a different angle, as one of a class, not one by herself. The girls all wore a profusion of ribbons and curls, and were all in an effervescence of noisy excitement regarding the effect of the dampness on their hair and their finery; they whispered and giggled together, and pouted at the young men, or tossed their heads and assumed exaggerated airs of being shocked at the personal remarks which these attendants volunteered, and with which they were, in fact, palpably delighted.
Anna, who attempted some quiet civilities from time to time, was regarded with undisguised indifference, as not being “one of the set.”
After the young people had left the house, however, Mally’s companion on their expedition, a young man somewhat above the others in intelligence, said to her:—
“What an unusual girl that friend of yours, that Miss Mallison, is. I never met any one just like her. She strikes me as a girl who would keep a fellow at a mighty distance; but if she ever did care for him, he wouldn’t mind dying for her, you know, and all that sort of thing. But she isn’t one of the kind you like to play games with.”