"Oh! I thought it was 'Alice in Wonderland'!" Joan was surprised into speech.
"That's a new one on me—'Alice in Wonderland,'"—commented the young man. "Is it good stuff?"
"You've never read 'Alice in Wonderland'? What a queer childhood you must have had!"
"Didn't have any," he replied, smiling up at her. Then he removed the smile, made a respectful little bow, and went on out the door.
Joan found that she was blushing, hotly; and no wonder. She was shocked by herself. She, one of Sister Mary Agnes's best exemplars of decorum, had deliberately started and continued a conversation with a strange young man met by chance on the dark stairway of a house where assuredly gentlemen did not live. ("Unless very poor gentlemen," she amended; for, ears or not, he seemed somehow to belong in the category of gentlehood.) Nor had she even terminated the conversation. It was he who had done that. He had shown more sense of the fitness of things than had she, Joan Darcy!
It was all the effect of the hospitable old hall, Joan decided. The house, like the roof of a friend, had introduced them. But what was he doing in such a house? It was not the sort of abode that would appeal, she fancied, to necktie drummers.
She opened Ellen's door without knocking. "Hello, there! Who's that I met on the stairs, and why does he call you 'Mrs.,' you giddy old fraud?"
A spoon dropped to the floor with a clatter as Ellen turned, beaming. "Land sakes! You might as well kill a person as scare her to death," she complained, far too pleased to admit it. "What you doin' down town this time o' day, all dressed up like lady-come-to-see? What do you want, eh?"
"Pancakes," explained Joan, ripping off her long gloves. "I'm going to stay to supper, Nellen, so get me an apron and let's begin."
Ellen's smile widened. "Pancakes! On a hot night like this?"