“Did you travel alone, Eleanor?”
“A friend of Grandpa’s came up on the train with me, and left me on the vessel. He told the colored lady and gentleman to see if I was all right,—Mr. Porter and Mrs. Steward.”
“And were you all right?” David’s eyes twinkled.
“Yes, sir.”
“Not sea sick, nor homesick?”
The child’s fine-featured face quivered for a second, then set again into impassive stoic lines, and left David wondering whether he had witnessed 5 a vibration of real emotion, or the spasmodic twitching of the muscles that is so characteristic of the rural public school.
“I wasn’t sea sick.”
“Tell me about your grandparents, Eleanor.” Then as she did not respond, he repeated a little sharply, “Tell me about your grandparents, won’t you?”
The child still hesitated. David bowed to the wife of a Standard Oil director in a passing limousine, and one of the season’s prettiest débutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the sidewalk, and decided that it must have been.
“I don’t know how to tell,” the child said at last, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”