"I am pleased to afford you a refuge in your social distress," returned Pauline. It flashed through her mind that circumstance was drawing upon her, to-night, for a good deal of bitter feeling. What subtle thunder was in the air, ready to sour the milk of human kindness to its last drop?
"My dear," murmured her aunt, temporarily discontinuing her stares, and speaking more in reproach than conciliation, "you must not be so very quick to take offence when none is intended."
Pauline gave a laugh which she tried to make amiable. "It pleases me to think that no offence was intended," she declared.
"Your little party was by no means a pis-aller with me, dear Pauline," here stated Sallie, "whatever it may have been in mamma's case. I really wanted so much, don't you know, to see these—a—persons." The peculiar pause which Sallie managed to make before she pronounced the word "persons," and the gentle yet assertive accent which she managed to place upon the word itself, were both, in their way, beyond description. Not that either was of the import which would render description requisite, except from the point of view which considers all weightless trifles valuable.
Pauline bit her lip. She had long ago thought Sallie disqualified for contest by her native silliness. The girl had not a tithe of her mother's brains; she possessed all the servitude of an echo and all the imitativeness of a reflection. But like most weak things she had the power to wound, though her little sting was no doubt quite unintentional at present.
Courtlandt here spoke. He was perfectly his ordinary sober self as he said,—
"I happened to drop in upon Aunt Cynthia to-night, and she brought me here. I believe that I come without an invitation. Don't I? I've forgotten."
"You haven't forgotten," contradicted Pauline, though not at all unpleasantly. "You know I didn't invite you, because I didn't think you would care to come. You gave me every reason to think so."
"That was very rude," commented Sallie, with a rebuking look at Courtlandt. She had a great idea of manners, but her reverence was quite theoretical, as more than one ineligible and undesirable young gentleman knew, when she had chosen to freeze him at parties with the blank, indifferent regard of a sphinx. "It is so odd, really, Pauline," she went on, with her supercilious drawl, which produced a more irritating effect upon her cousin because apparently so spontaneous and unaffected—"it is so odd to meet people whom one does not know. I have always been accustomed to go to places where I knew everybody, and bowed, and had them come up and speak."
Pauline busied herself for an instant in smoothing the creases of her long gloves between wrist and elbow. "Don't you find it rather pleasant, Sallie," she said, "to procure an occasional change?"