“Now see here, Miss Virginia,” the rector replied, “you just forget it. We are awfully glad to have you here, and we are going to have a right jolly supper together. Betty’s muffins are simply fine, and her creamed chicken is a dream. Besides, I want to consult you concerning the new wardrobe I am going to have built in the vestry. You see there is the question of the drawers, and the shelves, and––”
“Never mind the drawers and the shelves,” Mrs. Betty remarked as she entered with the creamed chicken and the muffins. “You just sit down before these things get cold, and you can talk business afterwards.”
To her utter astonishment Virginia soon found herself eating heartily, utterly at her ease in the cordial, 270 friendly atmosphere of tent-life, and when Maxwell took her home later in the evening, she hadn’t apologized or wallowed in an agony of self-reproach. She had only demanded the recipe for the muffins, and had declared that she was coming again very soon if Mrs. Betty would only let her.
And last but not least—the rector’s polite attention in acting as her escort home failed to work upon her dramatic temperament with any more startling effect than to produce a feeling that he was a very good friend.
In fact, she wondered, as she conned over the events of the evening, whether she had realized before, all that the word Friendship signified.
