“You were really rude to him to-night, and we can’t afford to lose friends nowadays.”
“Can’t we? I can, if I choose,” said Polly, doggedly.
Winnie said her prayers and put herself into her pretty, prim night garments, in which, as in everything else, she was such a contrast to Polly.
“I have always thought, do you know, Polly,” she observed, quietly, when her head was resting on the pillow, “that you could, if you chose to play your cards properly, get Hubert to propose to you some day. Men like all sorts of little attentions, and particularly now, if you only make yourself amiable and try to let him see that——”
Polly’s red-coated arm went up to the gas bracket just by her bed, and the room was suddenly made dark.
“Good-night,” she said, in a choked sort of way, and she turned over and lay with her face to the wall, staring with hot, angry eyes into the blackness, and wondering if all her future life was going to be as nasty and bitter and hard to bear as this particular moment.
Winnie’s last speech positively made her wince, as if some hard, sharp weapon had struck her tender flesh.
She hated the thought of the coming morrow, when she would have to meet Hubert. She told herself she never wanted to see him again. Who could say whether the same ignoble suggestion that Winnie had just made might not lie at the bottom of all his sympathetic kindness.
“Well!” she said passionately to herself—“well, if he is waiting for me to be nice to him he will have to wait a long time. I wish Winnie had not said this. I—I cannot understand what can have put such an idea into her head. Perhaps she was right about to-night, and I ought not to have let Hubert see me so hot and untidy. It was a mistake; but everything was so hurried, and I wanted the dinner to be nice for mother’s sake. Yes; I am sorry Winnie has said this, because now I shall be obliged to be as nasty as I can with Hubert—and—and——”
And poor little Polly could not find an easy ending to the train of thought.