Geraldine sneered. “I daresay you think it’ll make all the difference to you, too. It’s anything in trousers with you, old girl, whether the fellow belongs to another girl or not. But I’m not afraid of anything of that sort while Horace is about. He knows how to keep you in order, as Mother said.”
“I’ll thank you, and Mother too, to keep your opinion of me till it’s asked for.” Elsie, however, spoke mechanically.
She had immediately become obsessed by visions of herself and Morrison, walking, swimming, sitting beside one another on the sands, or in the intimate closeness and darkness of the picture palace....
“I’ll just tell you this, young Elsie. Leslie Morrison isn’t the sort of fellow you’ve been used to—not like Johnnie Osborne, and that truck. And as for carrying on with a married woman—why, he’d be ashamed to think of such a thing.”
Elsie smiled, and said nothing. She hardly heard what her sister was saying.
A hand laid upon her shoulder made her jump violently.
“Are you in the moon, Elsie? I’ve been making signs to you for ten minutes, I should think. It’s more than time we had our sandwiches,” said Horace Williams querulously.
“Oh, all right.”
By tugging and pulling at piled-up packages, they succeeded in getting hold of the basket in which Elsie had packed ham sandwiches, seed-cake, and bananas.
The train sped onwards....