“No.”
As they had planned it, without lingering or reproach.
“I’m not going to kiss you,” said Stuart. He did not even touch her; yet she winced and braced herself beneath his look as she had done perforce when his actual grip had tightened.
—“Hullo!”
The front door of the house was suddenly flung wide open, and Peter’s flapper cousin Jinny, flanked by a whole bevy of young people, flocked through the aperture, bore down upon her with boisterous greeting. And now steps and doorway and silent street were a-swarm with marionette-shapes, whose shrill cries and exclamations drowned the beat of Stuart’s retreating steps....
Peter was hauled indoors—she could almost hear her face click as she adjusted it to the suddenly altered conditions.
“Come along in, do; we’re kicking up no end of a shindy! I say, won’t your friend join as well?”
And then the red-plush drawing-room, with red-plush music tinkling from a cheap piano, and air thick with gas and seed-cake, and Cousin Constance, Jinny’s mother, saying with interpolation of stuffy and affectionate kisses: “These young folk are behaving disgracefully, my dear; but there, it’s Saturday evening, and I hope you ain’t too tired to join them.”
On Peter’s other side, a frivolous girl of thirty-six waggled a plump forefinger, “I saw you saying good-bye to your young man! I believe you must have quarrelled—he didn’t even kiss you good night.”
Next, she was introduced to the mild gentleman whom she had met there before—“So don’t you pretend to be hoity-toity, Miss Peter,”—and to the irresistibly humorous Tommy Cox, whom she hadn’t met there before, and who said straight away, “Now tell me this, if you can: could you make a Maltese Cross?”—and to Luke Johnson, the boy from next door,—while the landlady, who was also a friend of Cousin Constance, kept up a running fire of questions connected somehow with coffee: “Some people like it better with milk, and some people like it without; some people take two lumps of sugar, and some like one, so all you’ve got to do, Peter, dear, is to tell me how you like it best. Some people....” The saga began all over again.