They rose to go, Joy conscious of an acute sag in the waiter’s expression as he took the salver and walked away with failing footsteps. And then she turned and saw the table whose listening silence she had been appreciating throughout that time. She stared in stupefaction. The Lamkins; the Alfred Lamkins from Foxhollow Corners; pillars of the church, two solid, well-buttressed souls, with four white-eyelashed, shiny-nosed, unmarried daughters. All staring at Joy in that awful delight experienced by small-town souls when they find their neighbours doing something out of the ordinary.
“Why—there’s Joy Nelson!” said Mrs. Lamkin, in obviously manufactured surprise.
“So it is!” chorused the four white-eyelashed things. “Hello, Joy!”
It was plain that they expected her to stop and speak to them, exchange the usual banal what-are-you-doing-in-the-big-city of the out-of-towner, and present her companions. It was just as plain that she intended doing nothing of the sort, and with a confused nod of acknowledgement, her head down, she almost ran past them to the elevator.
“Did you see that waiter wilt at my twenty-five cent tip, and all the others melt away?” Harry chortled as they went down.
“Who were those people, Joy?” Jerry demanded, pulling her hat down and her hair out.
“People from home.”
“Home-town stuff!” Steve cried. “You’re compromised forever now, Joy; you’ll have to marry me now!”
“That’s not as bad as this fall, in at the Knickerbocker,” said Harry reminiscently. “I had the waiter sure I was the Prince of Wales and Steve here an escaped nobleman from Russia, conferring together about starting royalty over here, when up blows Dick Lindley and another poor egg, calling us by name and requesting the loan of some cash to get back to Princeton!”
The blithe youths left them at the Belmont. “We’ve been lowbrow this afternoon; we’ll be highbrow to-night,” said Steve. “We’ve wangled Harry’s mother’s box at the opera.”