“And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?”
“Oh, I thought you knew—to poor Mrs. Amyot. She’s been lecturing all over the South this winter; she’s simply haunted me ever since I left New York—and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last summer! One has to take tickets, you know, because she’s a widow and does it for her son—to pay for his education. She’s so plucky and nice about it, and talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that boy’s nearly educated!”
“Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?” I repeated. “Is she still educating her son?”
“Oh, do you know about her? Has she been at it long? There’s some comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy’s provided for the poor thing will be able to take a rest—and give us one!”
She laughed and held out her hand.
“Here’s your ticket. Did you say tickets—two? Oh, thanks. Of course you needn’t go.”
“But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine.”
“Do you really? That’s awfully good of you. Perhaps I’ll go too if I can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder”—in a well-directed aside—“if your friend—?”
I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too recent standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to go even if Charlie and the others wouldn’t.
The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor, who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening.