“Indeed one couldn’t. I believe she’d have roped me in if I’d lived with her; but I’m a frivolous good-for-nothing thing. You look so serious. Do you always feel that way?”
Patience smiled broadly. “Oh, no. I often feel that I would be very frivolous indeed if circumstances would permit. It must be very interesting.”
“You get tired of yourself sometimes—I mean I do. Are you very religious?”
“I am not religious at all.”
“Oh, how awfully jolly. I do the regulation business, but it is really tragic to carry so much religion round all the time. I wonder how Cousin Harriet and the Lord hit it off, or if they liked each other better at a distance? I corresponded once with the brother of a school friend for a year, and when I met him I couldn’t endure him. Those things are very trying. I am going to call you Patience. May I? And if ever you call me Miss Peele you’ll be sorry. How awfully smart you’d look in gowns. My colouring is so commonplace. If I didn’t know how to dress, and hadn’t been taught to carry myself with an air, I’d be just nothing—no more and no less. But you have such a lovely nose and white skin—and that hair! You are aristocratic looking without being swagger. I’m the other way. You can acquire the one, but you can’t the other. When you have both you’ll be out of sight.
“What fun it would be,” she rambled on in her bright inconsequential way, “if Bev should fall in love with you and you’d marry him. Then I’d have such fun dressing you, and we’d get ahead of my cousin Honora Mairs, whom I hate, and who, I’m afraid, will get him. Propinquity and flattery will bring down any man—they’re such peacocks. But I’ll bring him to see you. You ought to have a violet velvet frock. I’d bet on Bev then. But, of course, you can’t wear colours yet, and that dead black is wonderfully becoming. Can I bring him up in a day or two?”
“Oh, yes,” said Patience, smiling as she recalled her brief periods of spiritual matrimony with Beverly Peele; “by all means. I’ll be so glad to meet all of you. And you are certainly good to take so much interest in me.”
“I am the angel of the family. Well, I must be off, or I’ll have to dine all by me lonely. None of the rest of the family uses slang: that is the reason I do. May is a grown-up baby, and never disobeyed her mamma in her life. Honora is a classic, and only swears in the privacy of her closet when her schemes fail. Mother—well, you’ve seen mother. As you may imagine, she doesn’t use slang. Papa doesn’t talk at all, and Bev is a prig where decent women are concerned. So, you see, I have to let off steam somehow, and as I haven’t the courage to be larky, I read French novels and use bad words.”
She rose and moved toward a heavy coat that lay on a chair. “Well, Patience—what a funny lovely old-fashioned name you have—I’m going to bring Bev to see you as a last resource. I’ve tried him on a dozen other girls, but it was no go. I’ll talk you up to him meanwhile—I’ll tell him that you are one of the cold haughty indifferent sort, and yet withal a village maiden. He admires blondes, and you’re such a natural one. We’ll come up Sunday on horseback. Now be sure to make him think you don’t care a hang whether he likes you or not—he’s been so run after. Isn’t it too funny? I did not come here on matchmaking thoughts intent, but I do like you, and we could have such jolly good fun together. I’ll teach you how to smoke cigarettes—”
“But Miss Peele—Hal—you know—I don’t want to marry your brother—I have never even seen him—much as I should like to live with you—I’d even smoke cigarettes to please you—but really—”