“Yes, yes,” she remembered herself; “I will try to look pleasant. But I feel cross.”
“Well?... What went wrong with your dinner?”
“Oh, I made a fool of myself.”
“That sounds serious. Was it?”
“Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t suppose it was really serious.... But the whole thing has made me cross.”
192She labored under an urgent necessity to tell somebody all about it, that was evident.
“You see,” she plunged without preamble into her confidence, “from the beginning, I didn’t want that party! I love to have folks to dinner, any number, all the time. You know I just love a jollification. But this was different, as I knew it was going to be. It began with Charlie Hunt telling me–or, not exactly telling, I forget how it came out–that yesterday was his birthday. I said, ‘Come and celebrate with us!’ I was thinking of making a big cake and sticking it full of pink candles. And from that simple beginning, blessed if I know how it happened, except my always wanting to say yes to anything anybody proposes, it came to be a regular dinner-party, the kind they give over here, with courses and wines and finger-bowls, all the frills, and twelve people, not friends of mine at all, barely acquaintances, but people Charlie Hunt thought it would be nice to ask. Well, it was my fault, every bit of it, and nobody else’s. I’ve no business to say all those joyful yeses if I don’t mean them. Good enough for me if I have to swallow my pill afterwards without so much as making a face. It wasn’t so bad, after all, everything went all right, thanks to Clotilde and Charlie. Only I wasn’t having much fun. Charlie had planned how people should sit, and Mr. Landini was on one side of me, and he was making himself terribly agreeable. He means all right, but his talk, as I guess you know, isn’t a bit my kind. And last night, I don’t mind telling you–” her voice dropped to a note confidentially low, “with his compliments and incinerations, you’d almost have thought he was sweet on me. Only I know better. And so, as I say, I wasn’t having much fun. Then I don’t know what got 193into me. They were passing the fruit. I got up and went to the sideboard and took one of those fine hot-house looking peaches out of our permanent assortment that needs dusting every few days, and I came back to my seat and offered that marble fruit with a fetching smile to Mr. Landini. He looked as if he felt I was bestowing a very particular favor. He took it–and it dropped out of his hand on to the plate with a crash that laid it in smithereens.... You can see why I am cross.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, dear woman, if he were cross, too.”
“He was perfect! I respected him! Liked him better than I ever had before! I never saw anything so well done as the way he carried it off! I was never so uncomfortable in all my life, though we united in laughing, ha, ha.... Charlie would have taken my head off, if he had dared, afterwards in a corner of the parlor. But the first word he said, I cut in, short as pie-crust, ‘Young man,’ I said, ‘if you aren’t careful I shall sit on you. Do you know how much I weigh?’ And I meant it.”
Gerald prudently placed a paint-brush across his mouth, and shut his teeth on it as on a bridle-bit, to excuse his saying nothing in the way of comment on what he had heard.