My grandmother put up her lorgnette. “Azalea!” she said sharply.
“Yes, grandmother.”
“Your manners are admirable.”
“Thank you, dear grandmother. I dare say they are—are inherited.”
My grandmother smiled and traced her left eyebrow with her jeweled fingers.
“You may sit down near me,” she said. “I want to talk to you about your coming-out party.”
So then she told me something about her friends; who had done this and who that, and every one she mentioned was at least sixty years of age and some, as nearly as I could reckon, were eighty or over. So at last I said:
“And may I also be permitted to invite some of my own friends, dear grandmother? Carin Carson who is now in the North at college, and Annie Laurie Pace, who lives at Lee, and Mr. and Mrs. Rowantree of Rowantree Hall, and their brother, Keefe O’Connor who is at the Academy of Design in New York? And of course the McBirneys and the Summers, and—and some others.”
I couldn’t help thinking how I would like to have Haystack Thompson play at my party, and how horrified grandmother would be if she knew my thought and what Haystack is like.
“Are you sure,” said my grandmother, “that these friends of yours would find congenial surroundings at Mallowbanks, my dear Azalea? There is such a thing as propriety to be considered.”