I was disappointed, but I wouldn’t have shown it for the world. I couldn’t help thinking it was rather stupid of him not to have made a move to get away sooner, to have a moment’s talk in my parlor by my lamplight.
“From what you told me of her I thought she was rather high-pitched and western.”
“I never said that.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but somehow I got the impression. She’s anything but that—delicate, fine.”
“Um,” I responded. These positive opinions on a person I knew so much better than he did rasped me a little.
Roger shifted his hat to his left hand and moved to the stair-head.
“There’s something very unusual about her, a sort of fragile simplicity like a dogrose. Good-by, Evie. Good night.”
I went into my room. It was cold and the chill of it struck uncomfortably on me. I had a queer feeling of being suddenly flat—spiritually—as a flourishing lawn might feel when a new roller goes over it. It improves the looks of the lawn. That it didn’t have the same effect on me I noticed when I caught myself in the chimneypiece glass. What a dim little colorless dib of a woman I was! And how particularly dim and colorless a dib I must look beside Lizzie.
I got my supper, feeling aggrieved. I had never before accused fate of being unfair when it forgot to make me pretty. But now I felt hurt, meanly discriminated against. It wasn’t just to give one woman shining soulful eyes, set deep under classic brows, and another small gray-green ones that said nothing and grew red in a high wind. It wasn’t a square deal.
Yesterday afternoon Betty turned up and found the invalid sitting in my steamer chair looking at the juniper bush. Betty had never spoken to her before and they talked amicably, Mrs. Ferguson visibly thawing. I left them, for I want Betty to know her and help her of her own free will, want to eliminate myself as the middleman.