Betty was asking me with a superior air, if I couldn't understand that Ranny would "prefer to talk things over" before meeting her at a dinner-party "with everybody looking on." She reminded me a little tremulously that it would be their very first meeting "since...." There was a moment when I thought she was going to cry. And then, without any sense of transition, I wondered how anybody in the world could be as happy as Betty looked.
The next morning, still in a mood of the deepest dejection, I dated a sheet of paper, and began: "My dear Aunt Josephine."
I looked at the words for full five minutes, with a feeling of intense unwillingness to set down another syllable. And then I yielded to the impulse which made certain other words so easy, so delicious to say or trace. I took a fresh sheet. Before I knew, I had written: "Dear Mr. Annan."
Well, why not? Was it not better to write to him, rather than face another afternoon like yesterday? My mother wondering, suspicious; my own eyes flying back and forth like distracted shuttles from window to clock—from clock to window, hour after hour.
Dear Mr. Annan,—I have told my mother. She feels as you do. She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not to think about it any more.
I was his "sincerely," and I sent the note by one of the little Klauses.
CHAPTER XVIII
RANNY
I imagined that day I should never again have to live through a time of such suspense.