“He is dead,” Vestalia re-assured her. “He did go to the dogs, as you say. He had some sons, but they are dead too.”
“And so there were actually Skinners in the peerage!” mused Adele, aloud. The thought seemed to excite her. She rose and looked at herself in the mirror, over Vestalia’s head. The latter stood up as well.
“Oh, must you be going?” said Adele. “There was so much I wanted to say to you. We must meet soon again. I am going to insist upon that. You see, I know absolutely no one over here of my own sex, except you. It will be different in a few days, now, but that won’t make any difference with my liking you. Oh, yes—I wanted to ask you—do you know a Mr. Linkhaw?”
Vestalia looked blankly at her interrogator for a moment, then flushed a little and smiled confusedly. “I have heard the name,” she replied, “but I have never seen the gentleman bearing it.”
Adele drew her brows together in a half-frown. “He is a great friend of the gentleman who was with you at the Museum,” she said, doubtingly.
“Yes, I gathered that,” answered Vestalia. “It was in that way that I heard the name.”
“Really, how curiously we two are mixed up together!” cried the other, with dawning impatience. “You could tell me ever so many things that I am dying to know, if you only chose to. It is provoking to have to grope about in the dark like this. And you won’t even get vexed with me, and talk back. Even that way I might learn something—and we could make it up afterward, as easy as not.”
“Ah, but that is what I came resolved under no circumstances to do,” explained Ves-talia, with affable placidity. “Nothing would tempt me to get vexed with you.”
“Suppose I insisted upon talking unpleasantly about the gentleman at the Museum,” suggested Adele, with potential malice in her tone.
“I don’t say you can’t grieve me and hurt me, but you can’t make me angry with you. You see, I know things which you don’t know, which would entirely alter your views about me, and about other matters, if you were aware of them. So it would be unfair in me to blame you for remarks made in ignorance of the truth.”