III
Wilkinsons being kind to a Miller! Mrs. Wilkinson conducting Benedicta to a charming little bedroom, and actually kissing her at the door! Mr. Wilkinson meeting her in the dining room and saying:
“It’s a pleasure to see the daughter of Mr. Hamilton Miller in my house. Your father was one of my earliest customers.”
Mr. Wilkinson saying this, and not seeming at all ashamed of having had customers! Nan—that was Miss Wilkinson’s name—doing everything possible to make her somewhat difficult guest feel at home!
When at last she was left alone in her room to dress for dinner, Benedicta had to struggle with a great desire to cry, for ridiculous reasons—because Mrs. Wilkinson had kissed her, because the room itself was so pretty, furnished in white and lit by a rose-shaded lamp, because she was touched, and was ashamed of herself for being touched. She reminded herself that she had come as a favor to Nan, and against her own will. She remembered that everything in her chilly, bleak little room at home was an heirloom.
“I ought to have more poise,” she told herself sternly.
When she came down to dinner, she had perhaps a little too much poise. The Wilkinsons all kept on being kind, because it was natural to them, and because they knew all about the Millers and understood Benedicta; but the other guests saw in her nothing but a very stiff, cool, silent girl in a dowdy frock, and they didn’t like her.
There were two girls and three others, whom Nan called “boys,” but who were what Benedicta considered young men, and very frivolous ones. Three men and four girls!
“Of course, I’m the extra one,” she thought. “It doesn’t matter to me, of course.”
She felt still more extra and superfluous after dinner, when they began to dance as a matter of course. One of the men asked her to dance, but she declined. She told Mrs. Wilkinson that she didn’t care for dancing, but the truth was that she knew nothing but waltzes and two-steps, which were of no more use than minuets. It wouldn’t do, though, for a Miller to confess herself ignorant of the art.