“What did you think it would seem like?” Betty asked argumentatively. “Just because Nancy is the best friend you have in the world, and you’re familiar with her in pig-tails and a dressing-gown doesn’t argue that she is incapable of managing an undertaking like this as well as if she were a perfect stranger.”
“I don’t suppose it does,” Caroline mused, “but someway I’d feel easier about a perfect stranger investing her last cent in such a venture. I don’t see how she can possibly make it pay, and I don’t feel as if I could ever have a comfortable moment again until I knew whether she could or not.—What are you looking so guilty about, Billy?”
“I was regretting your uncomfortable moments, Caroline,” Billy said, “and wishing it 42 were in my power to do away with them, but it isn’t. I was also musing sadly, but quite irrelevantly, on the tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.”
“Are you deceiving Caroline in some way?” Dick inquired.
“No, he isn’t,” Caroline answered for him, “though he has full permission to if he wants.”
“The time may come when he will avail himself of that permission,” Betty said; “you ought to be careful how you tempt Fate, Caroline.”
“She ought to be,” Billy groaned, “but the fact is that I am not one of the things she is superstitious about. Pipe the dame at the corner table with the lorgnette. Classy, isn’t she?”
“Friend of my aunt’s,” Dick said, acknowledging the lady’s salute.
“And the Belasco adventuress in the corner.”
“My stenographer,” Dick explained, bowing again.