“But wouldn’t you prefer coming out and finding me well than coming out and finding me ill?” asked Scrap, smiling.
Even Mrs. Fisher was caught by the smile.
“Well, you’re a pretty creature,” she said forgivingly. “It’s a pity you weren’t born fifty years ago. My friends would have liked looking at you.”
“I’m very glad I wasn’t,” said Scrap. “I dislike being looked at.”
“Absurd,” said Mrs. Fisher, growing stern again. “That’s what you are made for, young women like you. For what else, pray? And I assure you that if my friends had looked at you, you would have been looked at by some very great people.”
“I dislike very great people,” said Scrap, frowning. There had been an incident quite recently—really potentates. . .
“What I dislike,” said Mrs. Fisher, now as cold as the stone she had got up from, “is the pose of the modern young woman. It seems to me pitiful, positively pitiful, in its silliness.”
And, her stick crunching the pebbles, she walked away.
“That’s all right,” Scrap said to herself, dropping back into her comfortable position with her head in the cushion and her feet on the parapet; if only people would go away she didn’t in the least mind why they went.
“Don’t you think darling Scrap is growing a little, just a little, peculiar?” her mother had asked her father a short time before that latest peculiarity of the flight to San Salvatore, uncomfortably struck by the very odd things Scrap said and the way she had taken to slinking out of reach whenever she could and avoiding everybody except—such a sign of age—quite young men, almost boys.