Mrs. Aldrich was greatly taken aback.
“I thought perhaps—” she began, in a tone not quite so neighborly, but the other interrupted.
“Very good of you, I’m sure; but I shall do very well, thank you.”
That last “thank you” seemed capable of lifting Mrs. Aldrich out of the garden all by itself.
“I wouldn’t set foot in that place again,” she declared, “if she begged me on her knees!”
This declaration was addressed to her nephew, Jerry Sargent. She had made it before, to her husband and to a neighbor or so, but she found special pleasure in telling things to Jerry, for the strange reason that he never agreed with her. She was a shrewd, sensible, rather peppery little woman. She had been his guardian when he was younger, and she still interfered[Pg 173] pretty considerably in his affairs—which he good-humoredly permitted.
“If you could have seen the way she looked at me!” she went on. “As if I were a—a toad!”
“I know,” replied Jerry. “I didn’t see her, but I heard her, and I know the sort of look that would go with that tone. ‘Who is that impossible person?’ She told me she didn’t encourage chance acquaintances, and it looks as if she meant it!”
“I should have made her get out of that taxi and walk—in the rain!” cried Mrs. Aldrich, who had been informed of the episode of the previous night.
“Of course you would,” her nephew agreed, with a grin. “I know you! And you’d have called her names out of the window as you passed her, wouldn’t you? But I’m much milder. I was ashamed of being a chance acquaintance, anyhow. It didn’t seem respectable.”