“It seems so queer to have dinner at six o’clock,” said Gypsy, confidentially, as they went down stairs. “At home they are just sitting down to supper.”
Joy laughed patronizingly.
“Oh, yes; I suppose you’re used to country hours.”
For the second time, Gypsy felt uncomfortable. She would very much have liked to ask her cousin what there was to be ashamed of in being used to country hours, when you lived in the country. But they had reached the dining-room door, and her aunt was calling out somewhat fretfully to Joy to hurry, so she said nothing.
After supper, her uncle said she looked very much like her father, hoped she would make herself at home, thought her a little taller than Joyce, and then was lost to view, for the evening, behind his newspaper. Her aunt inquired if she could play on the piano, was surprised to find she knew nothing more classical than chants and Scotch airs; told Joy to let her hear that last air of Von Weber’s; and then she took up a novel which was lying partially read upon the table. When Joy was through playing, she proposed a game of solitaire. Gypsy would much rather have examined the beautiful and costly ornaments with which the rooms were filled, but she was a little too polite and a little too proud to do so, unasked.
“What do you play most?” she asked, as they began to move the figures on the solitaire board.
“Oh,” said Joy, “I practise three hours, and that takes all the time when I’m in school. In vacations, I don’t know,—I like to walk in Commonwealth Avenue pretty well; then mother has a good deal of company, and I always come down.”
“Only go to walk, and sit still in the parlor!” exclaimed Gypsy; “dear me!”
“Why, what do you do?”
“Me? Oh, I jump on the hay and run down hills and poke about in the swamp.”