“Aren’t people funny?” said the younger sister suddenly, turning from her kneeling position on the rug, the hearth-brush in her hand. “They seem to be so different in different places.”
“How do you mean?” said June absently. “Who’s different in a different place?”
“Well, Barney is. He’s all right and looks just as good as anybody up at the mines. And down here he’s entirely different, he looks so red, and his feet are so big, and his hands never seem to know where to go unless he’s talking about mining things. His clothes never looked so queer up at Foleys, did they? They seemed just like everybody else’s clothes up there.”
“Oh, Barney’s all right,” returned the other, evidently taking scant interest in the problem. “I’m glad he and Mitty are going to be married.”
“But Rion Gracey’s not like that,” continued Rosamund, pursuing her own line of thought. “He’s just the same everywhere. I think he looks better down here. He looks as if he were somebody, somebody of importance. He even makes other people, that look all right when he’s not by, seem sort of small and insignificant.”
“Whom did he make look small and insignificant?” said June suddenly in a key of pugnacious interest.
“Jerry Barclay. I thought Jerry Barclay looked quite ordinary and as if he didn’t amount to much beside Rion. The things he said seemed snappish and sometimes silly, like what a girl says when she’s cross and is trying to pretend she isn’t.”
“I don’t think it very polite, Rosamund,” said June in a coldly superior tone, “to criticize people and talk them over when they’ve hardly got out of the house.”
“Well, perhaps it isn’t,” said Rosamund contritely, returning to her hearth-brushing, “but like lots of other things that aren’t just right it’s awfully hard not to do it sometimes.”
The girls went up stairs and June was silent. Rosamund thought she was still annoyed by the criticism of her friend, and so she was. For deep in her own heart the thought that Rosamund had given voice to had entered, paining and shocking her by its disloyalty, and making her feel a sense of resentment against Rion Gracey.